MCP server in Wagtail - experiments demo

Hi uh we shipped a new API in MarkTel 8. 0 a few weeks ago now and um this API is really like quite flexible and you can use it for all sorts of automation. Um And I thought it would be cool to show uh where we're at with experimentation with MCP specifically. So MCP just as a high level uh overview, it's a protocol that's uh kind of codifies how AI tools like agents work with external systems like Wactel. So we've been experimenting with an MCP server provided by Wagtail projects And uh I thought it wasn't in a good place to demo now. Um so just to be clear, I'm going to be demoing it with this agent interface built into the CMS.

But there's nothing specific about it being inside the CMS. Those exact same tools here could be made available outside. We'll try a few tasks. Could you give me an Overview of the site's SEO blog pages specifically. So here we're doing a kind of natural language query about the site's content. The AI itself doesn't necessarily know on its own what types of content are available on the sites, but you can inspect the data by calling out the different tools we've made available in the MCP server. And just to be clear, this AI hasn't been trained at all to have any awareness of those tools, so it's just figuring it out.

as it goes along, which is why some of those things might not be successful and why it might take some time for it to get an overview of the site's content. So here we can see it's fetching all of the sites pages in bulk and then switching to the details uh views, details contents of each of the pages. So what's really interesting to see here is not just how it retrieves the information but also how much it's able to display it and customize the display depending on the type of information it wants to present. It's not necessarily the best styling for formatting like this, but it can certainly be improved later down the line. And yeah, so this this uh AI is very um autonomous in this case. It has no restrictions whatsoever

on which tools it's uh able to find and use. Uh it's acting effectively with the same permissions as my current user account. And so it's able to find the content, uh also provide recommendations on the content, and it might even suggest that it can make those changes. Yeah, I want me to start fixing in these. So again here I can just say yes go for it make it all live and we'll happily oblige and update all of the site's content in one go. Not necessarily what you'd want to do, probably not what you'd want to do on most projects, but exactly the type of thing we want to experiment with at this stage. So here again, just keeping in mind this is brand new

and the AI hasn't been instructed on how to use those tools. Specifically , there's a fair bit of trail, trial and error. Just think of it as if uh the new agent was discovering the CMS for the first time. like we are and if we invest more into training the AI uh with documentation and so on it'll be more reliable in uh in work like this Yeah, so it looks like it has made updates to 13 pages on the site and uh reports back the status. Yeah, and there's some demo pages it hasn't updated. Um could you make a redirect from um slash fun to the homepage?

So yeah, it's not just page content that the AI can interact with. There's also lots of tasks like that. Can you export all of the sites? redirects there's no specific export function here so it'll be very interesting to see how it figures out what to do. Yeah so it just creates the csv file directly in the CMS Um, what are all of the tools you have available? So again at this point this is all based on our new API. So all of those tools here they map exactly to API operations. If this catches on, if there's interest in this, we might spend more time

creating tools that are purpose built for agents over MCP. But yeah, I hope you found this interesting and looking forward to any anal feedback