Members Only 1.8.0 is here, and it brings something new to WordPress membership sites: full support for the WordPress Abilities API.
With this release, Members Only exposes 25 membership operations — checking member status, granting access passes, managing subscriptions, auditing restricted content, and more — as structured, discoverable abilities that AI agents, automation tools, and other plugins can use safely.
What Is the Abilities API?
The Abilities API is a new WordPress core feature (introduced in WordPress 6.9) that gives plugins a standard way to describe what they can do — in a machine-readable format. Each ability declares what input it accepts, what output it returns, and who is allowed to run it.
Why does that matter? Because it’s the bridge between your WordPress site and the new generation of AI tools. When your site’s capabilities are described this way, an AI assistant connected to your site (for example, through MCP) can discover them and put them to work — with your permission and under your site’s existing access rules.
What You Can Do With It
Once you’re on WordPress 6.9+ and Members Only 1.8.0, you can connect an AI assistant to your site and simply ask:
- “Is jane@example.com a member? What’s her subscription status?”
- “Give Sam a 30-day complimentary access pass.”
- “How many new members did we get this month compared to last month?”
- “Find members who signed up in June but don’t have an active subscription.”
- “Cancel Alex’s subscription — but show me what would happen first.”
- “Which of our posts are restricted to members? Make this new post members-only.”
- “How many seats are left in the Acme Corp group? Send invitations to these three people.”
Behind each of those requests is a purpose-built ability with a defined schema, so the assistant knows exactly what information to provide and exactly what it will get back. No screen-scraping, no guessing, no fragile automation.
The abilities cover six areas:
- Member lookup — membership status, subscriptions, and access passes for any user
- Member management — create members, grant and revoke access passes
- Billing — cancel or reactivate subscriptions, generate Stripe billing portal links, list your plans and prices
- Content restriction — check who can see a post, restrict or unrestrict posts, audit all gated content
- Reporting — membership stats, signup trends, recent activity, and flexible member search
- Group Memberships — seat usage, rosters, and the full invitation lifecycle (when the Group Memberships extension is active)
Built Safe by Default
Handing membership operations to AI tools only works if the guardrails are real. Every Members Only ability:
- Enforces the same WordPress capability checks as the plugin’s own admin screens. An ability never does anything the logged-in user couldn’t do themselves.
- Declares whether it’s read-only or destructive, so well-behaved agents treat a subscription cancellation very differently from a stats lookup.
- Verifies ownership — subscription operations confirm the subscription actually belongs to the member in question before touching it.
- Supports previews where it counts — cancelling a subscription offers a dry-run mode that reports what would happen without making the change.
And sensitive data stays protected: invitation listings never expose invitation tokens, so acceptance links can’t be reconstructed.
Getting Started
- Update to WordPress 6.9 or later.
- Update Members Only to 1.8.0.
That’s it. There’s nothing to configure. Members Only registers its abilities automatically, and they’re ready for any tool that speaks the Abilities API.
Want to connect an AI assistant like Claude to your site? Using Abilities via MCP walks through the whole setup — installing the WordPress MCP Adapter, creating an application password, and connecting your client. It only takes a few minutes.
Want the full reference — every ability, its parameters, return values, and permission requirements? Start with the Abilities API Overview in our documentation.
The Abilities API is a big step toward a WordPress where your tools work for you — and we wanted Members Only to be ready. We can’t wait to hear what you build with it.