[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #64098: Introduce Abilities API

[WordPress Trac]

#64098: Introduce Abilities API
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 Reporter:  gziolo                                |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  feature request                       |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                                |   Milestone:  6.9
Component:  General                               |     Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal                                |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch 2nd-opinion has-unit-tests  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by gziolo):

 Thanks, @jorbin, for raising these points — they’re important
 considerations. I’d like to provide some additional context that may help
 clarify the current status and rationale behind proposing the Abilities
 API for 6.9.

 From my perspective, I can say that I made sure Automattic began testing
 an exact copy of the Abilities API in internal systems to validate the
 design even before the first public Composer release (`v0.1.0`). This
 release coincided with WordCamp US and was covered in both the AI panel
 and Matt’s keynote demo. The subsequent `v0.2.0` release, published two
 weeks ago, primarily incorporated enhancements to the public API based on
 feedback from production usage, early adopters testing, and core team
 reviews. This is also the version currently used by WordPress.com’s MCP on
 production. The latest `v0.3.0` release introduced one significant change
 — a mandatory category for each ability — a collective decision by the
 Core AI team to ensure scalability across the WordPress ecosystem,
 considering ongoing implementations such as the core’s MCP Adapter and Woo
 agentic projects that are developed publicly.

 This proposal follows a proven pattern established by past efforts like
 the REST API, HTML API, and Block Bindings. Each was introduced
 iteratively, with limited immediate integration in core but clear value
 for the wider community. The Abilities API similarly provides a stable,
 low-level interface that projects can build upon now, while allowing us to
 refine and extend it over time.

 Strategically, the API also prepares WordPress for the growing importance
 of AI-driven and cross-system integrations. Transformer-based systems
 increasingly rely on structured, callable actions—“abilities”—to describe
 functionality in a machine-readable, executable form. Having a formal API
 for defining and exposing those interactions ensures WordPress remains
 relevant as part of the AI-native web, while simplifying the developer
 experience through a unified, self-authenticating interface accessible via
 PHP, REST, or MCP.

 Merging the Abilities API in 6.9 gives plugin authors and extenders the
 opportunity to validate the approach during the release cycle,
 establishing a solid foundation for iterative improvements in future
 versions of core.

 There is also an open PR https://github.com/WordPress/abilities-
 api/pull/108 that is almost ready to land which proposes 3 basic read-only
 core abilities that we can ship together with API in WordPress 6.9. This
 is going to be the most challenging process to identify what WP core
 should offer as built-in abilities, and leaving that to the ecosystem
 might be the best idea. Our intuition tells us based on the prototypes
 floating around, is that WordPress core should offer CRUD operations for
 handling content and it's tracked in https://github.com/WordPress
 /abilities-api/issues/84. However, that's much larger effort than the API
 itself, so this is something we would like to experiment with in the AI
 featured plugin.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64098#comment:23>
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