one3rdnerd

Hi Jordy,

Thanks for that. I did read it, but I don’t think I fully understood everything.

Thanks for sharing the step-by-step recipe. Claude did suggest setting up redirects in .htaccess, so I was going to try that next but I’ll give the Cloudflare approach a try.

Update: It seems to be working, albeit very slowly.

A couple of differences in my case.

1) Worth mentioning you have to have your URL behind Cloudflare’s proxy for the rewrite to take effect. I was using Cloudflare already but it was set to DNS only.
2) The rules didn’t work for me at first, when I tried the curl test, it still threw a 404. So I switched to “Edit expression” and used
(http.host eq “example.com” and http.request.uri.path eq “/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server/wp-json/mcp/v1”)
This managed to give me the 200 response.
3) On windows you have to test with curl.exe -i “https://example.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server/wp-json/mcp/v1”

When I opened Claude Desktop again and went to my custom connector and hit connect, it gave me the screen I was hoping for that asks me if I want to connect:

Authorize this app Claude wants to connect to Pixelloop. Signed in as (admin) Permissions Administrator (full access) The app will be able to call MCP tools using your account. You can revoke access at any time from AI Engine settings.

I click Approve and then it goes to the Couldn’t Connect screen I was hitting before as soon as I clicked connect.

Authorization with the MCP server failed. You can check your credentials and permissions. If this persists, share this reference with support: “ofid_859bce83377c145a”

I had to make two other changes:

1) Cloudflare – bypass cache for the MCP paths. Caching → Cache Rules → Create rule:

• If: URI Path | starts with | /wp-json/mcp/
• Then: Cache eligibility → Bypass cache
• Deploy.

2) SiteGround – exclude the path from dynamic cache. SG Optimizer → Caching → add /wp-json/mcp/* to the dynamic-cache URL exclusions.

After I made the above two changes and tried to connect again, it successfully connected after I approved the connection in my browser.

But, when I go to use the connector in a Claude Code chat in the desktop app, I ask a question as a test (Check my website using Pixelloop A Engine and tell me how many published pages I have)

Then it asks for permission to check.

I’ll check pixelloop.org via the Pixelloop AI Engine. Let me load the right tool. Used 3 tools

The count call timed out. Let me verify the server is still responsive, then retry.

Used d83aca91-a3ac-44af-bee9-ab2019b1b4ba: mcp ping

Server’s fine. Retrying the page count.

Used d83aca91-a3ac-44af-bee9-ab2019b1b4ba: wp count posts

post_type: page

Tool call timed out waiting for server response.

The count endpoint keeps timing out (ping works, so it’s that specific query being slow). Let me try the pages listing endpoint instead.Used 2 tools

100 pages came back (the per-request max) and the payload was huge. Let me count entries in that file and then paginate for the rest. First, count this batch:Ran 4 commands

Done. I queried pixelloop.org through the Pixelloop AI Engine.Result: 29 published pages

I requested up to 100 published pages (post_type=page, status=publish) and the engine returned exactly 29 — since that’s fewer than the 100 max, it’s the complete set, no pagination needed.

A few notes:

• This counts WordPress Pages specifically (not blog posts/post type). If you also want the count of published blog posts, say the word and I’ll pull that too.
• The dedicated wp_count_posts endpoint timed out twice (the server itself is fine — mcp_ping responded both times), so I got the number directly from the pages listing instead, which is reliable here.

Okay, so it’s working now, great, but is it normal for it to take 8 minutes to answer the question “How many pages do I have published?) it seems like a long time and I want to see if that’s the same for you too?

I followed up with:

(List my registered post types.)

That also took 3m22s for it to reply. It also timed out a few times while trying to work it out. Are timeouts normal? Or could this just be an ephemeral result due to Claude being overloaded or having issues? My server and site seem fine and snappy.

I guess I should test it again tomorrow and see if it’s faster.

I appreciate your input and advice on this.

Actually, Claude pointed out an issue with the curl in Powershell.

So I ran it again with:

'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"test","version":"1"}}}' | Out-File -Encoding ascii body.json

curl.exe -i -X POST "https://pixelloop.org/wp-json/mcp/v1/http" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" --data "@body.json"

This time I got

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 26 May 2026 16:02:57 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 98
Connection: keep-alive
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Link: <https://pixelloop.org/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/"
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: X-WP-Total, X-WP-TotalPages, Link
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization, X-WP-Nonce, Content-Disposition, Content-MD5, Content-Type
X-Cache-Enabled: False
WWW-Authenticate: Bearer realm="MCP", resource_metadata="https://pixelloop.org/wp-json/mcp/v1/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource"
X-Httpd-Modphp: 1
Host-Header: 8441280b0c35cbc1147f8ba998a563a7
X-Proxy-Cache-Info: DT:1

{"code":"rest_forbidden","message":"Sorry, you are not allowed to do that.","data":{"status":401}}

So I think that’s correct because of a lack of a bearer token when doing it from the Terminal rather than the Claude Desktop app.

When testing in the Claude Desktop app I’m still getting the error, so it looks like Siteground is still refusing even when we take that approach where a bearer token isn’t needed.

What can we take away from this? Anything?

Hi Jordy,

Ah, okay. Thank you.

So, I ran that test, though I am using Windows and Powershell, so I had to modify it to

curl.exe -i -X POST “https://yoursite.example/wp-json/mcp/v1/http” -H “Content-Type: application/json” -H “Accept: application/json, text/event-stream” –data ‘{“jsonrpc”:”2.0″,”id”:1,”method”:”initialize”,”params”:{“protocolVersion”:”2025-06-18″,”capabilities”:{},”clientInfo”:{“name”:”test”,”version”:”1″}}}’

(obviously replacing https://yoursite.example with my domain)

It came back with

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 26 May 2026 14:49:16 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 144
Connection: keep-alive
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Link: https://pixelloop.org/wp-json/; rel=”https://api.w.org/”
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: X-WP-Total, X-WP-TotalPages, Link
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization, X-WP-Nonce, Content-Disposition, Content-MD5, Content-Type
X-Cache-Enabled: False
X-Httpd-Modphp: 1
Host-Header: 8441280b0c35cbc1147f8ba998a563a7
X-Proxy-Cache-Info: DT:1

{“code”:”rest_invalid_json”,”message”:”Invalid JSON body passed.”,”data”:{“status”:400,”json_error_code”:4,”json_error_message”:”Syntax error”}}

I have asked Siteground to explain where it’s getting stuck and to look at the logs, but they are being a pain in the ass.

I’ll send them the above again, but starting to think Siteground isn’t a platform worth sticking with at this point, my issue is, I manage 90+ websites all on Siteground, and many of them want this facility.

Agreed.

I tried setting up the MCP on a new Siteground site and when I click connect and it opens the browser to authenticate I get

Couldn’t Connect

Taking you back to the desktop app. You can close this tab.

Couldn’t reach the MCP server. You can check the server URL and verify the server is running. If this persists, share this reference with support: “ofid_851d5aac6a049e29”

I had Siteground whitelist my IP address and the IP addresses Anthropic uses but I can’t seem to get past that error.

Hi @tigroumeow,

Thank you.

Sorry, I should have followed up to let you know I had worked that out. Yes, just add a custom name for each site, which is actually a nice way to manage it and probably better than them all running under one MCP.

At the expense of wanting to keep this thread on topic, one unrelated question I had about AI Engine…

How do you see it evolving when WP 7 drops with their new native AI capabilities? Will you piggy back off of those? or will your AI implementation remain separate? Does WP 7’s native AI features give you any more opportunities or are they just implementing what you are already doing?