A Claude Code skill for managing WordPress.com sites from local markdown files. For the full pitch, see the homepage.
The story
This project was built in a week — during an Automattic support rotation in March 2026. The brief: use WordPress.com as a real customer, document the experience, file bugs.
Michael Pick (content designer at Automattic) decided to build the site entirely from his terminal, using Claude Code and the WordPress.com MCP integration. No block editor. No dashboard (mostly). Just markdown files, a conversation with Claude, and a lot of curiosity about what would work and what wouldn’t.
What happened was unexpected. The project stopped being “Michael uses a tool to publish content” and became something more like a genuine collaboration. Claude researched the APIs, wrote the converter scripts, structured the site, drafted and edited copy, debugged block markup, compared themes, and spotted design issues before Michael noticed them. Michael brought the editorial vision, made the creative calls, tested everything as a real user, and handled the dashboard tasks that MCP can’t reach yet — with Claude walking him through each one.
The site you’re reading is the result. Every page is a markdown file. Every push went through MCP. Most of the words were written by Claude, edited by Michael, or written by Michael and edited by Claude — and honestly, by Day 3, neither of us could always remember which.
Who it’s for
- Writers who work with AI agents — you’re already collaborating with Claude on your content, now your publishing workflow can live in the same conversation
- Markdown-native people — you think in plain text, you write in Obsidian or vim, and you’d rather grep your blog than log into a dashboard
- Curious non-developers — you’re comfortable in a terminal but you don’t want to run servers or write deployment scripts
- Teams who want version control — your content lives as files in a git repo, with WordPress.com handling the hosting
What we found
We filed 14 bugs and findings during the build — from MCP schema mismatches to a five-step quest to find Application Passwords (it took a content designer, an AI, and the WordPress.com Support Assistant to locate them). The MCP integration is genuinely impressive once connected, but the path to getting there has sharp edges.
We documented everything. Read the full build story on the blog.
Open source
wp-publish follows the open Agent Skills standard. The skill and this site’s content are on GitHub as a working example. Pull requests welcome.
wp-publish 