Alok Jain

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A book by Alok Jain

AI in WordPress

A Practical, Code-First Guide

WordPress 7.0 introduced a built-in AI Client — one consistent way to work with models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

This free, chapter-by-chapter, code-first guide helps you understand how it works through practical examples. You’ll explore temperature, tokens, structured output, multimodal responses, and more.

Each example is added to the same companion plugin as you progress, leaving you with one working reference instead of a folder of disconnected code snippets.

Table of contents Start reading

Table of contents

Read at your own pace

Module 1 — Foundations

Goal: first working call, safely.

  1. What Is the AI Client? Provider-agnostic API, Connectors, why it matters
  2. Your First AI Call Prompt → generate → result
  3. Never Trust the Network — Error Handling WP_Error convention, the habit to build now
  4. Debugging AI Client Failures is_wp_error() tells you that something failed; this is how you find out why
  5. Giving the AI a Job — System Instructions Role vs. request

Module 2 — Controlling the Output

Goal: precise, predictable, cost-aware text generation.

  1. The Creativity Dial — Temperature Randomness vs. determinism
  2. Don’t Blow the Budget — Max Tokens What a token is; cost & length control
  3. Ask for JSON, Not Prose Structured output via JSON schema
  4. Using the Data, Saving JSON to Post Meta Decoding & using the data (save to post meta)
  5. Give Me Options — Multiple Variations Several candidates, one call
  6. Fine-Tuning Generation, Top-P, Top-K, and Stop Sequences Alternative sampling controls, plain-English, when to reach for these vs. temperature

Module 3 — Beyond Text

Goal: images and mixed-media output.

  1. Your First AI Image Same pattern, new modality
  2. Image Variations & Output Control Multiple images, file type, orientation
  3. Text and Images Together, Multimodal Output Mixed-part responses

Module 4 — Giving the AI Context

Goal: move beyond single-shot prompts.

  1. Give the AI a File Passing an image/document as input (e.g. auto-describe an uploaded image)
  2. Multi-Turn Conversations Why LLMs are stateless and how history fixes that, shown as a before/after comparison

Module 5 — Production-Ready Habits

Goal: code that belongs in a real, published plugin.

  1. Don’t Build UI Blindly, Feature Detection Check before you render; graceful degradation
  2. What Actually Happened? — Full Result Objects Metadata: tokens, provider, model
  3. Politely Requesting a Model — Model Preferences Preference vs. requirement; fallback chain
  4. Exposing AI to the Frontend, Safely Why there's no direct client-side call; building your own scoped REST endpoint
  5. Who Gets to Use AI? — Access Control Blocking/limiting prompts globally or conditionally

Module 6 — AI Inside the Block Editor (Gutenberg)

Goal: bring AI into the actual authoring experience, not just admin-side PHP.

  1. Build Your First AI-Powered Block Registering a static block whose editor UI calls a new REST endpoint (same pattern as Ep. 20) via apiFetch
  2. Add “Improve with AI” to Existing Blocks Extending core blocks via block filters/toolbar controls, modifying RichText content
  3. AI Image Block — Generate & Insert Images from the Editor Editor-side image generation UI, inserting into Media Library / Image block

Module 7 — Frontend-Facing AI Features

Goal: AI features your site's visitors actually use — not just wp-admin.

  1. A Public AI-Powered FAQ / Search Widget Public-facing REST endpoint security: nonces, rate limiting, capability scoping for logged-out users
  2. Smart Comment Reply Suggestions Logged-in-only frontend feature, JS + REST
  3. A Multi-Turn Chatbot Widget on the Frontend Combining with_history() (Ep. 16) with the REST pattern (Ep. 20) for a stateful frontend chat

Module 8 — Capstone Projects

Goal: combine everything into shippable features.

  1. Capstone 1: AI Alt-Text Generator Prompt + system instruction + JSON schema + error handling + feature detection + REST endpoint — admin/Media Library feature
  2. Capstone 2: AI Content Block + Frontend Widget Custom block (Module 6) + public REST + history (Module 7) — a block editor tool and the matching frontend-facing experience it powers

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© 2026 Alok Jain

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