MCP for Convert Forms is a free add-on for MCP for J that puts your Convert Forms install in front of your AI client. Thirty tools cover forms, individual form fields, submissions with every answer resolved back to the label of the field it came from, and Tasks — the on-submission engine behind your notification emails and app integrations — plus reporting and diagnostics. It runs against the free edition and against Convert Forms Pro, works out at runtime which one it's looking at, and tells you plainly when a field type or an app needs Pro instead of letting you add something that would never fire.
Why this exists
A Convert Forms form is six database columns, and five of them are bookkeeping. Every field, every validation rule, every success behaviour and all the styling live in one JSON blob called params. That's comfortable while you're clicking around the builder and awkward for anything else, because changing one thing means rewriting the whole blob, and a partial rewrite silently deletes every field you didn't happen to resend. This add-on does that read-modify-write for you, and it refuses outright the one patch shape that would cost you a form.
The other half of the reason is Tasks. In Convert Forms 5 the email that tells you someone filled in your contact form isn't a setting on the form at all — it's a Task, stored in its own table, and when it stops arriving the evidence sits in a task-history table nobody thinks to open. Asking your AI client which tasks failed recently is one sentence and one call.
What Claude can do
Thirty tools, grouped roughly the way you'd reach for them.
| Area | Tools | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Forms | 7 | List, read, create, update, duplicate, publish or unpublish, delete. Updates are merge patches, so you change one setting without resending everything else. |
| Fields | 5 | List a form's fields, add one, update, delete, reorder. The list of usable field types is discovered from what's actually installed rather than assumed. |
| Submissions | 5 | List and read with each answer matched to its field's label, correct a value, change state, delete. A question somebody left blank comes back as an explicit null rather than just going missing. |
| Tasks | 9 | List the apps this install can actually run, then create, read, update, enable, disable and delete the Tasks that fire on submission — plus task history, which is where you find out why an email never arrived. |
| Reports | 2 | A roll-up across every form, and a submission summary for one form. |
| Diagnostics | 2 | Component and edition info, and the full field-type registry split into what you can use here and what needs Pro. |
Installing it
You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and Convert Forms itself — the free edition is enough.
- Open Components → MCP for Joomla → Browse MCP Add-Ons and click Install on this add-on. You can also download the ZIP above and install it through System → Install → Extensions.
- That's the whole install. The plugin enables itself, and the tools show up in your connected AI client the next time it lists them.
There's no admin screen for this plugin, by design — it adds tools to MCP for J rather than a place to click. If you go hunting for a menu entry after installing, that's why there isn't one.
Using it
Ask for what you want in plain language. "Why has my contact form stopped emailing me?" checks whether the email Task is still enabled and then reads its recent history. "Add a phone field to the booking form, required, after the email field" adds it and puts it where you said. "Which forms got no submissions at all last month?" runs the roll-up.
Writes go through Convert Forms' own classes rather than straight into the database. Forms are saved through the component's form model so the per-field-type hooks run, and Tasks through its own table class so its encoding rules apply — which matters, because that class re-encodes a task's options every time it's stored, and a naive load-then-save round trip turns the configuration into an opaque double-encoded string. There's deliberately no tool that creates a submission, since the only correct way to do that is the front-end pipeline, and that runs your form's PHP scripts and fires every Task including outbound email. A tool for it would be a way to make your site send mail as a side effect.
Free, Pro, and why this one is free
These add-ons follow a rule: an add-on's tier mirrors the tier of the extension it wraps. Nobody should be asked to pay Cybersalt for AI access to an extension they already got for nothing. Convert Forms is where that rule is easiest to see, because Convert Forms itself comes in both editions and the database schema is byte-identical between them. What differs is which plugins ship and which field classes exist on disk.
So the base surface is here, in the free add-on, and it works against either edition. On a free site the Pro-only field types are reported as locked, which is more useful than hiding them, because Convert Forms' own builder lists them too and renders a padlock. On a Pro site they light up by themselves, with no second plugin needed. The tools that genuinely have nothing to do on a free site — submission export, visitor analytics, app connections, geo-IP and file cleanup — ship separately as MCP for Convert Forms Pro, and that one is a package rather than a bare plugin, because installing it also installs this add-on underneath. The two never share a tool name, so running both together is safe.
Permissions and security
Third-party API secrets stay put. Convert Forms stores the credentials for its app connections in a params column, and the tool that lists connections returns the id, the app and the title, and nothing else, so tasks can be wired up by id without the keys ever being read back out.
Two write guards are worth knowing about before you meet them. Renaming a field orphans its historical submissions, because nothing in Convert Forms rewrites the old rows and submitted data is keyed by field name. The update tool counts how many submissions a rename would strand and refuses unless you confirm you meant it. And deleting a form that still has submissions is refused until you say what should happen to them.
It hasn't been run against a live site yet
Worth saying plainly. Version 1.0.1 is written from a close reading of the Convert Forms 5.2.4 source, every tool is lint- and resolution-checked, and the writes go through Convert Forms' own model and table classes rather than hand-rolled SQL. But no tool here has executed against real data on a live install.
The read tools are safe to explore with and the best place to start. Take a backup before you point the write tools — forms, fields, submissions and tasks — at a production site. If you run into something, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
Open source
GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as Joomla itself. Source lives on GitHub.
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