Letting an AI assistant read your POP invoices (WordPress Abilities and WP-CLI)

Goal

Let an AI assistant connected to your WordPress site (or a command-line script) search invoices and credit notes already generated by POP on WooCommerce, Paid Memberships Pro, or Paid Member Subscriptions, and retrieve their XML, PDF, or structured data — without granting direct access to the database or the filesystem.

This is a different mechanism from POP’s hosted MCP server (see mcp and mcp-remote): that one talks to the POP Cloud API and creates new documents for any platform; this one works locally on your own WordPress site, on orders your store has already invoiced, and doesn’t generate anything new — it only serves already-cached documents.

Prerequisites

• pop-wordpress 6.9.11 or later.
• For the WP-CLI path: no other dependency, just shell/SSH access to the site.
• For the AI assistant path: the site needs a registered Abilities API (wp_register_ability() function available, typically via the “Abilities API” plugin) and an MCP server exposing the site’s abilities (typically the “MCP Adapter” plugin) — pop-wordpress only registers its own abilities when these are present, and does nothing otherwise.

What it exposes

Four abilities, category pop:

• pop/search-invoices — search invoices/credit notes by provider, customer, address, status, document type, or date range; returns document ids for use with the other three.
• pop/get-invoice-data — structured document data (invoice number, status, total, currency, dates, active fiscal channel, formats available in cache).
• pop/get-invoice-xml — cached XML (invoice/credit note).
• pop/get-invoice-pdf — cached PDF metadata and URL.

Steps

AI assistant path (Abilities/MCP)

1. Install and activate the Abilities API and MCP Adapter plugins on the WordPress site, in addition to pop-wordpress.
2. Connect your AI assistant to the site’s MCP server (address and authentication depend on the installed MCP Adapter plugin).
3. Ask your assistant something like “Find July invoices for customer Smith”: the assistant uses pop/search-invoices, then pop/get-invoice-data/xml/pdf on the document it found.

By default, every ability requires the WordPress manage_options capability (filterable via wc_el_inv-abilities-capability), because it’s reachable over HTTP.

WP-CLI path

wp popapi invoice search --customer="Smith" --date_from=2026-07-01
wp popapi invoice get <document_id> --provider=woocommerce
wp popapi invoice xml <document_id> --raw
wp popapi invoice pdf <document_id>

• search accepts --provider, --customer, --address, --status, --document_type, --date_from, --date_to, --limit (default 10, capped at 50), --offset.
• get/xml/pdf require <document_id> as a positional argument, plus --provider (required when multiple providers are active on the site), --document_type, --parent_id (for credit notes).
• All four accept --format=table|csv|json|yaml|ids|count and --fields=<comma-separated list>.
• xml --raw prints only the XML content, with no metadata.

WP-CLI commands do not enforce the manage_options gate: shell/WP-CLI access to the site is already a stronger trust boundary than a WordPress capability, so no --user is required.

Verify

wp popapi invoice search --format=count should return a number consistent with invoiced orders on the site. On an existing document, wp popapi invoice get <id> --provider=<provider> should return structured data with no errors.

Common errors

• pop_ability_forbidden (403, AI path only) — the authenticated user lacks the required capability: check the role or the wc_el_inv-abilities-capability filter.
• pop_ability_invalid_provider — the site has multiple providers active (e.g. WooCommerce and PMPro together) and you didn’t specify --provider/provider: the message lists the active providers to choose from.
• pop_ability_document_not_found — the document id doesn’t exist for the given provider/type.
• pop_ability_xml_not_found / pop_ability_pdf_not_found — the document has no cached XML/PDF: these abilities only serve already-generated documents, they don’t create new ones on the fly.
• No ability registered (silent, no error) — the Abilities API/MCP Adapter plugins are missing: the WP-CLI path remains available regardless of these plugins.

Related configuration

To generate or send new documents from an AI assistant (not just retrieve existing ones), see mcp or mcp-remote, which work at the POP Cloud API level and don’t require extra WordPress plugins.