Umbraco releases Developer MCP Server

Cyborgs, androids, and .NET developers rejoice: you can now integrate AI into your Umbraco workflows. With the beta release of the Developer MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server, AI agents can be plugged directly into Umbraco using the Umbraco Management API.

Zoom and Enhance Your Workflow

So what does this mean for you? What can you do with Umbraco’s brand new beta Developer MCP Server? Well, the new MCP Server allows developers to use natural language prompts to complete a host of useful tasks including:

• Querying Content
  Developers can ask an AI agent to retrieve content via Umbraco’s Management API. For example, developers can now ask something like “show me all blog posts older than 30 days”. Querying content via an AI agent makes SEO specific tasks a breeze: think auditing content, generating summaries of content, or highlighting stale content for review.
• Updating properties
  Content fields can be targeted and updated directly using an AI agent. For example, you could ask the AI agent to update the meta description field of all blog pages. The agent will find the relevant document type and updates the metaDescription property via the Management API. This makes batching activities much faster and reduces the reliance on creating scripts to batch tasks.
• Managing media
  Developers can run AI agent queries over media libraries. This makes tasks like updating meta data or mass uploading media files much easier and faster.

Quick side note: for marketing teams interested in boosting their SEO using similar means, we offer a Content Review Dashboard package which plugs into your Umbraco CMS. The Content Review Dashboard flags content across your website that could do with refreshing with a view to improving your SEO ranking.Get in touch for a demo call.

Honey, AI bricked the Content Management System

Giving your new robot friend complete, unfettered access to your Umbraco instance might possibly fill you with dread. Understandably so: we saw what can happen with a rampant AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey - not so pretty.

While your AI agent is unlikely to do anything quite so untoward, you can imagine how a misinterpreted prompt and an AI agent with a little too much access to your CMS could be a bad combination. However, you can rest assured that the Developer MCP Server has robust guardrails built in to ensure that an AI agent can't go anywhere it shouldn't:

Intelligent Permission System

The Developer MCP Server has a very handy Intelligent Permission System which means that it respects your existing Umbraco permission model. The tools that are available to AI agents are automatically filtered by:

• Section access (Content, Media, Settings, etc.)

• Tree-level permissions

• User group memberships

• Content-level permissions

Environment Variables

In addition to the Intelligent Permission System, Umbraco have added environment variables that give developers more granular control over the specific tools available to the AI agent. These brand new environment variables are:

Tool-Level Control

• UMBRACO_INCLUDE_TOOLS — Whitelist specific tools (comma-separated)

• UMBRACO_EXCLUDE_TOOLS — Blacklist specific tools (comma-separated)

Collection-Level Control

• UMBRACO_INCLUDE_TOOL_COLLECTIONS — Enable entire tool collections

• UMBRACO_EXCLUDE_TOOL_COLLECTIONS — Disable entire tool collections

Installation

Give it a try today! Umbraco have made it even easier to install the MCP server now that it's in beta.

Installing the Developer MCP Server has been streamlined after a migration to the official Umbraco GitHub repository. Along with the repo migration, Umbraco have also moved the MCP Server to a new location in the official Umbraco NPM namespace.

GitHub Repo

https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS-MCP-Dev

NPM Package Location

·         New package: @umbraco-cms/mcp-dev

·         Installation: npx @umbraco-cms/mcp-dev@beta