I attended CloudFest Hackathon 2025, organised by Carole Olinger, Alain Schlesser and Lucas Radke. It was awesome to meet old friends and make new acquaintances in Europa Park, Germany. Here’s the recap of this 8th edition!
10 projects in competition for #CFHack25
This year, 10 projects were in competition – check out for yourself the diversity of the topics covered:
- Peer-to-peer RAG Framework with Wesley Stessens and Franco Lombardo
- CMS Freedom with Patricia Brun Torre and Dennis Snell
- CMS Health Checks with Oliver Bartsch
- WP-CLI as an MCP Host with Pascal Birchler
- Federated Community Events with Andreas Heigl and Matthias Pfefferle
- Securing the Supply Chain for OSS with Néstor Angulo de Ugarte and John Blackbourn
- AIccessiblity Content Updater with Nemanja Cimbaljevic and Anthony Ledesma
- CMS Cloud Manager with Markus Kostrzewski and Javier Casares
- Accessible Infographics with Anne-Mieke Bovelett and Nina Jameson
- WordPress Staging Environment Manager with Tadas Pukas and Paulius Lescinskas
That’s quite broad, isn’t it? I love it when it’s so hard to choose from the list! A few projects particularly piqued my interest: CMS Cloud Manager because it was sysadmin (it would be nice to implement on FastNyx), Accessible Infographics because I would love to work with Anne-Mieke, Peer-to-peer RAG Framework because my friend Wesley is leading the project, and WP-CLI as a MCP Host since it touches WP-CLI with AI.
I finally joined the WP-CLI as a MCP Host table.
What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardised interface designed to enable AI models—like large language models (LLMs) or AI assistants—to interact seamlessly with external systems and applications. Rather than requiring developers or AI systems to manually parse complex documentation or adapt to a wide variety of APIs, MCP provides a unified way for AI to discover available capabilities, call specific functions or tools, and receive structured responses from the target system.
In practical terms, MCP acts as a bridge between AI and software platforms. It allows AI assistants to:
- Discover what actions or data are available from a system (such as creating posts, retrieving content, or managing users in WordPress).
- Call these capabilities as if they were simple functions, without needing to know the technical details of the underlying APIs.
- Receive structured, predictable responses, making integration and automation much easier.
This approach is particularly powerful for developers and organisations looking to integrate AI into their workflows, as it removes much of the friction typically involved in connecting AI models to real-world applications.
MCP in the WordPress Ecosystem
Within the context of WordPress, MCP enables AI-powered interactions with WordPress sites through standardised interfaces. A WordPress MCP Server exposes the site’s REST API endpoints and other capabilities in a way that AI models can easily understand and use. For example, an AI assistant can:
- Retrieve the latest posts or comments.
- Create or edit content.
- Manage users or plugins.
- Chain multiple actions together (e.g., summarise GitHub issues and publish them as a blog post).
The WordPress MCP Server handles authentication, endpoint discovery, and request formatting, making it possible for AI models to interact with WordPress securely and efficiently.
Why MCP Matters for Developers
Traditionally, integrating AI with WordPress—especially in local development environments—has been challenging. While REST APIs allow for some AI interactions on live sites, local development workflows lacked seamless AI integration. MCP changes this by providing a protocol that works both locally and remotely, enabling developers to leverage AI for content creation, site management, and automation directly from their command line or development environment, without needing a live site or custom API integrations.
The Vision: a Universal “USB-C Port” for AI
A helpful analogy is to think of MCP as the “USB-C port for AI applications”. Just as USB-C provides a universal connector for hardware devices, MCP aims to standardise how AI models connect and interact with software systems. This universal approach unlocks new possibilities for automation, content generation, and intelligent site management—making advanced AI capabilities accessible to WordPress developers, content creators, and DevOps teams alike.
Our project : WP-CLI as a MCP Host
The Team
Pascal Birchler was our project lead, a Software Engineer at Google and a WP-CLI Maintainer. He defined the roadmap with a few must-have features we had to write in the next few days.
Our team was composed of:
- Pascal Birchler – @swissspidy
- Jan-Willem Oostendorp – @janw-me
- Joost de Valk – @jdevalk
- Marco Chiesi – @marcochiesi
- Matt Biscay – @skyminds
- Moritz Bappert – @moritzbappert
- James Hunt – @thetwopct
- Tome Pajkovski – @tomepajk
- David Mosterd – @davidmosterd
- Milana Cap – @zzap
The project
Our project aimed to implement the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the WordPress ecosystem, specifically integrating it with WP-CLI.
The core innovation is transforming WordPress into an MCP Server and WP-CLI into an MCP Host through a new package, enabling direct AI interactions with WordPress installations during development. This approach provides developers with powerful AI capabilities without requiring a live site or REST API endpoints.
WordPress MCP Server Layer:
- Implementation of the MCP Server interfaces in WordPress
- Resource providers for posts, pages, media, and other WordPress content types
- Tool definitions for common WordPress actions (content creation, media handling)
- Context providers for WordPress configuration and site state
WP-CLI MCP Host Package:
- MCP Host implementation within the WP-CLI framework
- New command namespace for AI operations
- Integration with (local and remote) LLM providers
- Transport layer for local WordPress communication
MCP can be thought of as the “USB port for LLMs,” a standard way for LLMs to interact with any third-party system using functions like function calling.
While the Hackathon project focused on WP-CLI, the MCP Server is usage-agnostic and can also be exposed via HTTP. The MCP Host gets information (such as a list of available tools) from the server and passes it on to the LLM (e.g. Gemini).
We primarily used Google Gemini as our LLM since it can generate images on the fly.
CloudFest Hackathon 2025 Winners
🏆 Tech Visionary Award
Proudly sponsored by Hostinger.
- Winner: Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
- Second Place: WP-CLI as an MCP Host
- Third Place: Securing the Supply Chain for OSS
🏆 Dream Team Award
Proudly sponsored by Omnisend.
- Winner: Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
- Second Place: Accessible Infographics
- Third Place: Federated Community Events.
🏆 Social Media Master Award
Proudly sponsored by Kinsta.
- Winner: WP-CLI as an MCP Host
- Second Place: Accessible Infographics
- Third Place: WordPress Staging Environment Manager
🏆 Pitch Perfect Award
Proudly sponsored by Codeable.
- Winners (tie): CMS Freedom & Securing the Supply Chain for OSS
- Third Place: Accessible Infographics
🏆 Breaking Barriers Award
Proudly sponsored by Automattic.
- Winner: Accessible Infographics
- Second Place: WP-CLI as an MCP Host
- Third Place: AIccessiblity Content Updater
🏆 #CFHack2025 Overall Winner
Proudly sponsored by GREYD.
- Winner: Accessible Infographics
- Second Place: WP-CLI as an MCP Host
- Third Place: Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
Congratulations to all the winners and participants!
Our Codeable group
CloudFest’s Hackathon was also the occasion to meet up with some of my friends at Codeable. Here’s a photograph of our Codeable group at the hackathon, with Jan-Willem, Wesley, Tome, Birgit, Shanta, Lucio, Nemanja, Zeshan, Farhan, and me:
It was nice to see and chat with all of you, before we meet again at WordCamp Europe!
Key facts, organising team, and partners
Carole made it much easier for me to gather the stats this year: she had them printed on the back of the hoodie :)
We were 110 attendees, from 24 countries and 4 continents. 15 project leads led 10 projects during 3 days of coding – that represents more than 2500+ hours of coding. What a feat!
CloudFest Hackathon is made possible thanks to Carole Olinger, Alain Schlesser, Lucas Radke, Thierry Muller and help from Simon Kraft as assistant:
We also thank all the partners who make this fabulous event possible: Hetzner, Ominsend, Patchstack, Typo3, Automattic, Codeable, GoDaddy, Elementor, Greyd, Hostinger, Kinsta and Emilia Capital.
The Cloudfest Hackathon 2025 was an absolute blast—a whirlwind of creativity, collaboration, and community spirit! From the very first coffee-fueled brainstorming session, I found myself surrounded by passionate developers, designers, and WordPress enthusiasts from all over the world. It was incredibly energising to strike up conversations with people who shared my excitement for open-source, and together we dove into problem-solving, code sprints, and late-night laughter.
The best part? Not only did I get to contribute to meaningful projects like “WP-CLI as a MCP Host”, but I also made new friends, learned from brilliant minds, and felt the true power of the WordPress community. Whether you’re a seasoned contributor or a first-timer, the hackathon is the perfect place to connect, create, and make a real impact, while having a ton of fun along the way!
Thank you all for your passion, your contributions, and for helping to democratise open-source together! I can’t wait to see what we’ll build next – hope to see you all again next year!
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