An agent that can publish is an agent that can embarrass you. An agent that can draft is one that saves an afternoon. The difference is a permission boundary, and it is the single most useful thing to get right when connecting an agent to a CMS.
This page describes the workflow we would use, built around the WordPress MCP Adapter and a small skill library.
The short answer
Give the agent the ability to create drafts and edit existing drafts, not to publish. Review the draft, then publish as a human. Everything else — structure, internal links, metadata — can be automated without touching the live site.
Why drafts first
Publishing is irreversible in the way that matters: search engines index it, feeds syndicate it, and the URL may be quoted. A draft is reversible and reviewable in the tool people already use.
This is not distrust of the model. It is the same rule teams apply to junior colleagues: full access to the drafting environment, approval for the live one.
What the adapter exposes
The WordPress MCP Adapter turns WordPress abilities into MCP tools, so an agent acts through a defined interface rather than ad-hoc REST calls. The practical benefit is predictability: the same tool, the same schema, the same result.
It also makes permissions legible. What the agent can do is exactly what the token and the user role allow — which is why the role should be editor, not administrator, and why a dedicated service user is better than a personal account.
The workflow
| Step | Agent | Human |
|---|---|---|
| Choose the topic and angle | Proposes | Decides |
| Draft the article | Writes | — |
| Add structure, links, metadata | Writes | — |
| Review tone and claims | — | Reads |
| Publish | — | Clicks |
The agent's column is wide and the human's is narrow, which is the point: the check is cheap because it is one decision, not a review of every paragraph.
What to automate and what not to
Safe to automate: front matter, headings, internal links to existing entries, meta description from the content, image placement, taxonomy assignment.
Not safe to automate without review: factual claims about third-party products, prices, dates, and anything that asserts a person or company did something. These are the sentences that get quoted, and there is no downstream check.
The quality gate
Three checks before a draft becomes a post:
- Does the first paragraph answer the question in the title? If not, the draft is not ready.
- Does every internal link resolve? A 404 in a published post is a permanent small embarrassment.
- Is there a date on every claim? A post about a fast-moving product without a checked date decays silently.
These are exactly the checks this directory applies to its own articles, and they are the reason the AEO structure exists.
The service user
Create a dedicated account for the agent: editor role, a memorable name, and a note in the profile saying what it is allowed to do. Do not reuse a person's account, even your own.
Two reasons. Attribution: every draft has a discernible author, which matters when someone asks who wrote the post. And revocation: when the workflow changes or the integration is retired, you disable one account instead of auditing a person's access.
What the review actually looks at
The human review is not a line edit. It is three decisions: does the piece answer its own title, does it make any claim we cannot support, and would we put our name on the framing. Everything else — typos, structure, links — the agent can fix on request.
That is a five-minute review for a piece that took ten minutes to draft. The ratio is what makes the workflow worth running at all; if the review takes forty minutes, the agent is producing a different piece than you would write, and the draft is not saving time.
The rollback
Keep the previous version of a post accessible before an agent edits it. WordPress revisions do this by default, and a sensible limit keeps the database from bloating. The point is that an edit by an agent should be as reversible as an edit by a person.
If the workflow cannot be rolled back in one step, it is not ready for content that has already been published.
Frequently asked questions
Can I let it publish scheduled posts? If the content is templated and low-risk, scheduling is a reasonable middle ground. For anything with claims about third parties, review wins.
What about revisions? WordPress stores them by default, which changes the recovery calculus. Enable a sensible revision limit and treat drafts as the review surface.
Does this work for non-WordPress sites? The pattern does, with a different server. The boundary — draft creation, human publish — is what transfers.
Last checked: 9 November 2026.
Related: skills vs prompts for writing, AEO: writing to be quoted, and MCP servers.