Managing your CMS with your own MCP server

Your marketing team wants a landing page for next week's campaign. The copy is ready and the components already exist in your CMS. Even so, it becomes a ticket for the web team, or an afternoon of dragging blocks around in an admin panel only one colleague really knows. With your own MCP server, you ask Claude or ChatGPT in plain language, and the page appears as a draft in your CMS.

What is an MCP server?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's an open standard that lets an AI assistant work with other software. Anthropic introduced it at the end of 2024; Claude and ChatGPT, among others, now support it.

An MCP server is the piece of software that tells the assistant what it can do in a system, and carries out those actions. For a website, that means fetching, creating and editing pages in your CMS. But only through the actions the server offers. If it isn't in the server, the assistant can't do it.

What can your team do with it?

Anything an editor now does by hand in the CMS that comes up often enough to eat into their time. For example:

• Setting up a new page with the components of your own design system.
• Editing copy, meta titles and descriptions, including in a second language.
• Adding a blog post, a case study or an event.
• Choosing an image from the media library.
• Requesting a preview link to review the draft.

Why not just use an AI writing assistant in your CMS?

A writing assistant produces text. It doesn't know what your site is made of. Paste that text into a page and you're back to shuffling blocks around.

Your own MCP server does know your design system. It describes every component: which fields it has, which are required and which values are allowed. So the assistant builds the page from your own components instead of inventing a layout. The result looks like the rest of your site, because it's made of the same parts.

How do you stay in control of what the assistant does?

Everything the assistant creates or changes is saved as a draft first. The server returns a preview link. Only when someone has reviewed the draft and pressed publish does it go live.

You also decide in the server which actions exist. If your team should only prepare pages, you don't build an action to publish or delete. And the server only gets the CMS permissions it needs for its tasks.

What does that look like in practice?

For Sprints & Sneakers we built the headless platform in Next.js and Strapi. It comes with an MCP server their team uses to manage the website through Claude: creating pages, adding blog posts and case studies, all with the components of their own design system. A request goes like this:

• Someone asks Claude for a campaign landing page and includes the copy.
• Claude asks the server which components are available and what each one needs.
• Claude saves the page as a draft in the CMS and returns the preview link.
• Someone on the team reviews the draft and publishes it.

Who is this useful for?

Teams that publish often: marketing, an editorial team, recruitment. That's where the CMS costs the most clicks, and that's where the design system is already worked out. If your site has a handful of pages that rarely change, the CMS itself is quick enough.

What do you need?

A CMS with an API, such as Strapi, and a well-described set of components. When we build a website, we include the MCP server. If your site already runs on a headless CMS with an API, a server can also be added alongside your existing site.

Curious how that would work for your site? See what we do in custom website development or book an intro call.