Introduction to WordPress 6.9
WordPress 6.9, scheduled for release on December 2, 2025, is set to revolutionize the way themes and plugins interact with the platform. The new Abilities API is a game-changer, introducing a standardized system that enables advanced AI-driven functionality. This API will allow plugins, themes, and core to describe their capabilities in a format that’s easy for both humans and machines to understand.
What is the Abilities API?
The Abilities API is designed to address a long-standing issue in WordPress: the scattered nature of functionality across custom functions, AJAX handlers, and plugin-specific implementations. The purpose of the API is to provide a common way for WordPress core, plugins, and themes to describe what they can do in a standardized, machine-readable form. This approach enables discoverability, clear validation, and predictable execution of abilities, regardless of their origin.
What is an Ability?
An "ability" is a self-contained unit of functionality that includes its inputs, outputs, permissions, and execution logic. This structure allows abilities to be managed as separate pieces of functionality, rather than fragments buried in theme or plugin code. By registering abilities through the API, developers can define permission checks, execution callbacks, and validation requirements, ensuring predictable behavior wherever the ability is used.
Benefits for Developers
Developers gain several advantages by registering functionality as abilities. Abilities become discoverable through standardized interfaces, which means they can be queried, listed, and inspected across different contexts. Developers can organize them into categories, validate inputs and outputs, and apply permission rules that define who or what can execute them. One significant benefit is automatic exposure through REST API endpoints under the wp-abilities/v1 namespace.
Best Practices for Abilities
To prevent conflicts and errors, WordPress has created a set of rules for abilities. These include:
- Using namespaced names to prevent conflicts (e.g., my-plugin/my-ability)
- Using only lowercase alphanumeric characters, dashes, and forward slashes
- Using descriptive, action-oriented names (e.g., process-payment, generate-report)
- Following the namespace/ability-name format
The Abilities API Components
The Abilities API introduces three components that work together to provide a complete system for registering and interacting with abilities:
- A PHP API for registering, managing, and executing abilities
- Automatic REST API exposure, which ensures that abilities can be accessed through endpoints without extra developer effort
- A set of new hooks that help developers integrate with the system
Design Goals
The Abilities API is guided by several design goals, including:
- Discoverability: Allowing every ability to be listed, queried, and inspected
- Interoperability: Enabling different parts of WordPress to create workflows together
- Security: Defining permission checks to determine who and what can invoke abilities
Part of the AI Building Blocks Initiative
The Abilities API is part of the AI Building Blocks initiative, which aims to prepare WordPress for AI-driven workflows. This system provides the base for AI agents, automation tools, and developers to interact with WordPress in a predictable way. Abilities are machine-readable and exposed in the same manner across PHP, REST, and planned interfaces.
Conclusion
The introduction of the Abilities API in WordPress 6.9 marks a significant change in how functionality is organized, described, and accessed across the platform. By creating a standardized system for defining abilities and exposing them in different contexts, WordPress is positioning itself at the forefront of future AI innovations. This update has the potential to revolutionize the way developers interact with the platform, and its impact will be felt for years to come.