EX:OH CMS MCP

EX:OH supports a technology called MCP. This allows us to interface the CMS with your favourite AI tool, like Claude, Codex, Cursor.

By now most of us have had the same experience: you ask your AI assistant to help with a customer's website, it writes you a perfectly decent set of paragraphs, and then you spend the next half hour copying and pasting them into the right fields of the CMS, page by page.

With MCP your AI tool can do that last part itself, inside the boundaries you set for it.

What is MCP

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is an open standard that lets an AI tool connect to another piece of software and use the tools that software offers, much like you would use the buttons in its interface.

Once connected to EX:OH CMS, your AI tool can find and read pages, create new ones, add and rearrange sections, update details like SEO, upload images to the media library, preview its own work, and publish or unpublish pages.

Changes to pages land on the draft first. Every publish or unpublish needs a publication note, which ends up in the logbook of the page, so you can always see what was changed and why. This information also feeds into the larger context of the agent so that it is aware of why something changed; adding to the perception of intelligence.

Themes can also carry guidance written for AI tools, explaining which page types and sections to use and how to fill them in. The agent follows the same conventions your theme builder set out for your own staff.

Configuring MCP in EX:OH CMS

Access is set up per organisation, from that organisation's MCP panel:

• you create a token for each AI tool, with a label so you know which is which (for example "Johnny's Token"); a token only ever sees the content of its own organisation, and you can revoke it at any time
• each website of the organisation has its own MCP switch, off by default, so an agent can only work on the sites you have switched on
• themes opt into MCP, so the AI only builds with themes that have been prepared for it

For platform owners there is also an administrator token that can work across all your organisations. It switches itself off when it hasn't been used for a while.

Day-to-day content work

Plenty of your customers already produce content somewhere else: a monthly newsletter, product updates in a spreadsheet, a list of upcoming events.

You can point your agent at that material and let it do the retyping. It creates the page in the right place, fills in the sections, uploads the images and publishes the page with a note explaining where the content came from.

The same goes for tidying up what is already there. The classic example here is SEO. A customer asks why their pages look so plain in search results, and you discover half of them never had a meta description filled in.

With MCP you can ask your agent to find every page without a meta description or thumbnail, read each one, write a description that fits and save it to the draft. You then review and publish, or let the agent publish with a note per page.

Generating a whole website based on onboarding documentation

When a new customer comes on board they usually hand over a pile of material: a brand guide, a list of services, team bios, a logo and a folder of photos.

Combined with the onboarding workflow described on the Organisations page, MCP lets you turn that pile into a first version of their website:

1. create the new organisation, but don't invite anyone into it yet
2. create an MCP token for it and hand it to your AI tool, together with the onboarding documentation
3. the agent sets up the site with your theme, uploads the logo and photos and builds out the pages section by section
4. you review the result, impersonate the organisation to tidy up anything that needs a human touch, and then invite the customer in

Your customer gets a presentable site to react to on day one, and you spend your time on the parts of the website that need your judgement.