A LIYANS MCP connection is only ever as powerful as you decide — but the deciding happens in two places, and understanding both is the difference between a tidy setup and a token that can do far more than its job. This guide explains the model and gives three recipes we recommend.
When you create a token under LIYANS MCP → Connection, you tick a subset of eight scopes:
read — inspect and read published content.write — create and edit content and layouts (as drafts).publish — use the explicit publishing paths.media — media library and image import.commerce — WooCommerce tools.seo — SEO audit, inspection and meta writes.devices — device records and responsive overrides.settings — allowlisted site settings, homepage and menu locations.The token’s scope set is also its visibility set: tools/list returns only the tools those scopes unlock. A read-only token does not merely get refused when it calls a write tool — the write tools are absent from its catalogue entirely.
Every token belongs to a WordPress user, and every call is additionally checked against that user’s current capabilities. The effective permission is the intersection of the two. Practical consequences:
seo scope owned by an account that cannot edit posts still cannot change meta.A token’s secret appears exactly once, at creation. Only its hash is stored, so there is nothing in the database worth stealing and no way to “look up” a lost secret later — if you lose it, revoke the token and mint a new one. Tokens can carry an expiry (30, 90 or 365 days) and can be revoked instantly from the same Connection screen. The OAuth 2.1 path follows the same philosophy harder: single-use codes, rotating refresh tokens, and grant-wide revocation if a retired token is ever re-presented.
Scopes: read. Owned by any account that can read the site. Perfect for a first connection, an audit, or a reporting assistant: it can inspect everything published and change nothing at all.
Scopes: read, write, media, seo. Owned by an editor-level account. Builds pages, imports images and fixes metadata — everything as drafts, because publish is deliberately left out. You review and publish.
Scopes: read, write, commerce — owned by a shop-manager account. Keep it separate from the builder token: if a store credential ever needs revoking, your page-building connection should not go down with it.
The principle underneath all three is least privilege with a short memory: narrow scopes, a named owner, an expiry where it fits, and revocation the moment a connection stops being used. The plugin enforces the intersection on every call; these habits make sure there is something sensible to intersect.