AI coding agents for WordPress projects

Coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or Codex write code from their training and from what they can read in your project. On a WordPress codebase, both are often thin. This guide explains how Laravel Boost and Nectar give an agent working on a Pollora project the context it is missing.

This is not about the “WordPress MCP” servers that let an assistant create posts or edit pages on a live site. Those work on content. Boost and Nectar work on code: how your application is built, inspected while you develop.

Why agents get WordPress wrong

A few properties of WordPress make it hard to infer from source code alone:

• Global state. Much of WordPress is global functions and global variables ($post, $wp_query). What a template can rely on depends on where in the request it runs, which the code does not say.
• Hooks registered at runtime. Behaviour is attached with add_action() and add_filter() from the theme, from plugins and from core. Reading your theme does not show which filters a plugin adds, or which post types exist once every plugin has loaded.
• Many eras of documentation. Tutorials for the classic editor, the block editor, functions.php snippets and different PHP versions coexist on the web. An agent has no reliable way to tell which one matches your project.

On a Pollora project there is one more gap: Pollora registers post types, taxonomies and hooks with PHP attributes and routes WordPress pages with Route::wp(). An agent that has not seen these conventions falls back on plain WordPress code (register_post_type() in functions.php), which works against the framework.

How Laravel Boost works

Boost is Laravel’s package for AI-assisted development. It gives an agent three kinds of context (Boost documentation):

• AI guidelines. Instruction files loaded upfront, when the agent starts, with the conventions of the packages you use. boost:install writes them into the files your agents read (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and so on).
• Agent skills. Focused modules, each a SKILL.md file, that the agent loads on demand when it works on a matching task.
• An MCP server. Tools the agent can call to inspect the running application: application info, database connections, schema and queries, log entries, the last error, browser logs, absolute URLs, project rules, and Search Docs, which queries Laravel’s hosted documentation API for your installed package versions.

Boost lists set-up steps for Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot (VS Code) and Junie. Third-party packages can ship their own guidelines in resources/boost/guidelines/ and skills in resources/boost/skills/; Boost installs them alongside its own. Nectar uses that mechanism.

Boost knows Laravel. It has no WordPress guidelines or skills, and its documentation API covers Laravel ecosystem packages, not WordPress.

What Nectar adds

Nectar (pollora/nectar) is a Boost extension for Pollora projects. It adds the WordPress and Pollora side.

Guidelines

Loaded upfront through Boost, they describe Pollora’s architecture (Laravel routes first, the WordPress template hierarchy as fallback, Blade only), the registration attributes (#[PostType], #[Taxonomy], #[Action], #[Filter], #[Schedule], #[WpRestRoute], #[Ajax], #[Ability], #[SkipDiscovery]), Route::wp(), Sage Directives in Blade, theme structure and the Artisan commands. A key rule they state: never call WordPress registration functions directly, use attributes and discovery. The guideline text is picked from your installed framework major (12.x or 13.x).

Agent skills

Nine skills, loaded when the task matches:

Skill	Covers
pollora-post-types	Custom post types with #[PostType]
pollora-taxonomies	Custom taxonomies with #[Taxonomy]
pollora-theming	Blade or block themes, Vite, Tailwind CSS, theme.json
pollora-hooks	Actions and filters with attributes or facades
pollora-blocks	Gutenberg blocks with JSX/TSX and Blade rendering
pollora-rest-api	REST endpoints with #[WpRestRoute], AJAX with #[Ajax]
pollora-scheduling	Recurring tasks with #[Schedule] and WordPress cron
pollora-modules	Laravel Modules (nwidart) with discovery
pollora-abilities	The WordPress Abilities API with #[Ability]

MCP tools

Nectar runs its own MCP server, pollora-nectar, next to Boost’s. Its ten tools read the live environment, which is the part static code cannot show:

Tool	Returns
pollora_status	PHP, Laravel, Pollora and WordPress versions, active theme, discovery cache status, installed Pollora packages
wordpress_info	WordPress version, site URL, active and inactive plugins, active and parent theme, multisite, key constants, locale, permalink structure
post_types_info	Registered post types and their configuration
taxonomies_info	Registered taxonomies and their configuration
registered_hooks	Hooks discovered from #[Action] and #[Filter], with class, method and priority
active_theme_info	Theme structure, providers, blocks, Blade templates, Vite and theme.json status
discovered_components	All auto-discovered components, grouped by type
wordpress_routes	Routes, including Route::wp() conditions
modules_info	Installed Laravel Modules and their status
wp_option	One WordPress option value by key

Every tool is marked read-only: none of them changes the application.

Upgrade prompts

Nectar also exposes MCP prompts that walk an agent through a Pollora upgrade step by step. Each registers only when the installed framework version matches:

• upgrade-pollora-v13, for projects on Pollora 12.x moving to 13.
• upgrade-pollora-v13-32, for projects on 13.0 up to, but not including, 13.32. It covers the dependency changes, cweagans/composer-patches 2, renamed Artisan commands, extracted packages, blocks, skeleton files and theme changes.

Install and configure

Nectar requires Laravel Boost, so one Composer command installs both:

composer require pollora/nectar --dev

Then let Boost write the guidelines and skills for your agents:

php artisan boost:install

Select pollora/nectar when Boost asks about third-party packages, or add it to boost.json and update:

{
    "packages": ["pollora/nectar"]
}

php artisan boost:update

Register the Nectar MCP server in the project’s .mcp.json, next to the laravel-boost entry Boost creates:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "pollora-nectar": {
            "command": "php",
            "args": ["artisan", "nectar:mcp"]
        }
    }
}

In a DDEV project, run the server inside the container instead:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "pollora-nectar": {
            "command": "ddev",
            "args": ["exec", "php", "artisan", "nectar:mcp"]
        }
    }
}

For an agent that does not read .mcp.json, register the same command (php, arguments artisan nectar:mcp) in its MCP settings. After a composer update, run php artisan boost:update again to refresh guidelines and skills; --discover also offers those of newly installed packages.

Nectar loads only when APP_ENV is local or development. Set NECTAR_ENABLED=false to turn it off locally.

Example prompts

With guidelines, skills and tools in place, prompts can stay short:

• “Add an event post type with a venue taxonomy and show it in the REST API.” The post-types and taxonomies skills point the agent to attribute classes such as #[PostType('event')] and #[ShowInRest] instead of register_post_type(). It can then call post_types_info to check that the type is registered.
• “Why doesn’t my filter on the_content run?” The agent can list discovered hooks with registered_hooks, compare priorities, and check which plugins are active with wordpress_info.
• “Render single events with a controller.” The guidelines describe Route::wp('single', ...); wordpress_routes shows which routes already exist.
• “Create a hero block with inner blocks.” The blocks skill describes the resources/views/blocks layout, render.blade.php and <InnerBlocks />.
• On a 13.4 project, ask the agent to use the upgrade-pollora-v13-32 prompt to plan the upgrade.

Limits

• Pollora only. Boost runs in a Laravel application, and Nectar requires pollora/framework. Neither works on a standard WordPress install without Pollora.
• Development only. Nectar does not load in production or staging environments.
• Read-only introspection. Nectar’s tools report state; you still review what the agent writes.
• Discovery-based hooks. registered_hooks lists hooks declared with Pollora attributes. Hooks a third-party plugin adds with add_action() do not appear there.
• No WordPress documentation search. Boost’s Search Docs covers Laravel ecosystem packages. For WordPress core APIs, the agent relies on its training and on the code.
• Upgrade prompts are narrow. They exist for 12.x to 13 and for 13.0–13.31 to 13.32. A project already on 13.34 sees neither.

To start a project with this set-up, see Installation. The full reference is on the Nectar overview page.