MCP for Cookies Policy Notification Bar - Manage your cookie consent bar from your AI client

Written by: Tim Davis Created: 20 October 2026

Category: Extensions

New!Hits: 5Reading time: 00:25

MCP for Cookies Policy Notification Bar is a free add-on for MCP for J that lets your AI client manage Web357's Cookies Policy Notification Bar. Its 14 tools cover the bar's position, behaviour, colours and buttons, the consent-cookie settings, the Cookies Manager, menu visibility, cookie categories, cookie declarations and the texts in your site's default language. A diagnostics tool then loads your home page as a brand-new visitor and checks that the bar on the live page matches what was saved. It works with both the free and PRO editions of the bar, and on the free edition it refuses to write PRO settings.

Why this exists

A cookie bar is something you set up once, and then something nags at you. Is the Reject button actually showing? Did the new analytics category make it into the Cookies Manager? Is the bar even appearing for visitors who haven't been to the site before? Cookies Policy Notification Bar 5 keeps every one of its settings in a single block of JSON, and you edit that through its dashboard one screen at a time. This add-on lets you ask those questions in a sentence, make the change, and then see whether the live page agrees.

What Claude can do

There are 14 tools, grouped roughly the way you'd reach for them.

Free, PRO, and which add-on you need

Cookies Policy Notification Bar comes in a free edition and a PRO edition. Web357 describes PRO as adding cookie blocking, consent logs, GeoIP targeting, multilingual texts and settings import/export. Everything else, from the bar itself to the categories, declarations and default-language texts, is in both. The two add-ons split along that same line, because nobody should pay us for AI access to an extension feature they already have for free.

This add-on works on either edition and reads which one it's looking at the same two ways Web357's own code does. On a PRO site, set_cpnb_config will also change the PRO switches, such as turning cookie blocking or consent logging on. On a free site it refuses those settings outright, even though the settings JSON would quietly accept them, because writing them would be walking around Web357's paywall. The Pro add-on needs CPNB PRO itself, which you buy from Web357, as well as a Cybersalt Pro membership.

One thing worth knowing: Web357 no longer offers the free edition as a download. The free download link now refuses access, and the Joomla Extensions Directory lists the bar as a paid download. Sites that installed the free edition before that still run it, and this add-on is for them as much as for PRO sites.

Installing it

You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and Cookies Policy Notification Bar 5.x from Web357, free or PRO.

1. 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.
2. 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.

Using it

Start with "Give me an overview of my cookie bar" and then "Check my cookie bar's health". The health check looks for the things that go wrong without telling you: a plugin in the package switched off, no texts saved for your site's default language, cookie categories that are empty or duplicated, menu visibility rules pointing at menu items that no longer exist, and GeoIP lists set in a way CPNB will ignore.

After that, ask for what you want in plain language. "Move the bar to the bottom left and add a Reject button" changes the settings. "Add a declaration for the _ga cookie, two years, used by Google Analytics" adds it to the Cookies Manager. "Did that change reach the live page?" fetches your home page with no cookies, the way a first-time visitor would see it, and lists any difference between what's rendered and what's saved. A save that reports success is a claim. The rendered page is the proof.

A few of CPNB's habits are handled for you. It replaces lists like categories and declarations whole when it saves, so the tools read the full list, change the one row you asked about and write the full list back. If you delete every cookie category, CPNB doesn't show none. It falls back to four built-in sample categories, so the tools won't remove the last one. And texts are stored per language tag, so text saved for British English is invisible on a site whose default language is US English. set_cpnb_texts always writes to your site's default language for that reason.

If the bar is switched off, CPNB's own save can wipe its settings

This is the one thing to know before you change anything with the bar's plugin disabled. CPNB 5 stores every setting in the parameters of its system plugin. When it saves, its settings model starts from the current settings it gets from Joomla's plugin helper, and that helper returns nothing for a disabled plugin. So a save made while the plugin is off starts from an empty set and writes back only what you just changed. In testing, one save took the configuration from 434 settings down to 2. The dashboard still looked normal afterwards, because it fills any gaps with its bundled defaults.

The tools here never let CPNB read its own starting settings. They read the stored settings straight from the database and hand them to CPNB's model, so a save keeps everything you didn't touch whether the plugin is on or off. The same test run through set_cpnb_config kept all 434. After every save, each key is read back from the database before the result is reported. Unknown setting names are refused too, because CPNB's model silently drops keys it doesn't recognise and still reports success.

Permissions and security

The tools ask for the same permission CPNB's own dashboard does, which is Manage on the Cookies Policy Notification Bar component, checked for the person whose MCP connection makes the request. Writes go through CPNB's own settings model, so its validation rules and its cache clearing apply exactly as they do from the dashboard.

The custom_js and custom_css settings are output on every front-end page, so changing either one needs an explicit allow_custom_code confirmation. And if your site has consent logs, the health check reminds you that uninstalling CPNB drops that table.

How it was tested

This is version 1.0.0. Because the free edition can't be downloaded any more, every tool was driven end to end against Cookies Policy Notification Bar 5.1.2 PRO on Joomla 6.2. The free-edition paths, which are refusing PRO settings and writing texts for the default language only, are covered by offline tests but haven't yet run against a real free build. If you're on an older free install, start with the overview and the health check, and I'd like to hear how it goes.

Open source

GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as Joomla itself. Source lives on GitHub.

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