Every agency that builds WordPress sites has had the same experience in the last two years: an AI assistant that can write a beautiful landing page in a chat window — and then a long, manual hour of copying that work into the site, widget by widget, setting by setting. The Model Context Protocol changed what is possible. An MCP client can hold a live connection to a system and act inside it. The obvious question was what it should connect to on a WordPress site, and who controls that connection.
The first generation of WordPress MCP connectors treated the connection itself as the product: a licence server in the middle, a quota of “actions”, features unlocked by tiers. We understand the business model. We also think it is the wrong shape for infrastructure that sits inside someone else’s website. A connection to your own site, on your own hosting, should not need a vendor’s permission to keep working — and it certainly should not phone home to ask.
So LIYANS MCP is the opposite shape. It is a self-contained WordPress plugin: the MCP server runs inside the plugin, on your hosting, under your WordPress users and capabilities. There is no vendor server in the design at all. Nothing to activate against, nothing that can be switched off remotely, nothing counting your calls.
The core is GPL-2.0-or-later and unmetered, and that is a founding rule of the project, not a launch promotion. All 61 tools are in it — the Elementor builder, the build sessions, the inspectors, OAuth 2.1, the safety machinery. Our commercial plans live strictly around the core: services and separate add-on modules, never a meter inside it. If that ever changed, the code is GPL — anyone could fork the last honest version. We think that is exactly the kind of guarantee infrastructure should ship with.
The second founding decision was ordering: safety first, capability second. An AI connection that can edit a live site is only useful if leaving it switched on is boring. So the plugin is draft-first, deletes only to the Trash, snapshots before it changes layouts, intersects token scopes with the token owner’s live WordPress capabilities on every call, and writes an audit log into a table you own. The clever parts — multi-page build sessions, deep form and SEO inspectors, rendered-output verification — were built on top of that floor, not instead of it. The companion article explains the model in detail.
Finally, we decided the engineering record would be public: the audits, the feature inventory with code evidence, the bug tracker, the verification reports — including the sections titled NOT VERIFIED. A plugin that asks for write access to your website should be able to show its workings. Ours ship in every source archive. Where our testing has not reached — a PHP 7.4 runtime, multisite, Elementor Pro — the documents say so, and so does our roadmap.
LIYANS MCP 1.4.0 is ready. It is free, it is yours, and it runs on your terms — which was rather the point.