MCP for JoomRecipe is a Pro add-on for MCP for J that lets your AI client work on the recipes in JoomBoost's JoomRecipe. It lists and reads recipes, checks a recipe against your house style before anything is saved, creates new recipes as unpublished drafts and saves changes to existing ones. Every write goes through JoomRecipe's own Save, so image sizes, aliases, tags, ingredients and the SEO analysis come out exactly as they would from the admin form, and it never publishes anything. It was originally created by Dragan Subotic at Radnička klasa, where it runs a real recipe site, and is now maintained by Cybersalt.
Why this exists
A recipe has a lot of moving parts: a hero image in three crops, ingredient groups, equipment, seasons, categories, tags, nutrition and an SEO check. Typing one into the admin form takes a while, and keeping a whole site consistent, with the same units, the same tag count and images named the same way, takes longer. Dragan built this so a recipe written with an AI could go into JoomRecipe in one step, checked against the site's own rules first, without anything going live until a person looks at it.
What Claude can do
Five tools.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
joomrecipe_list_recipes | Lists recipes with their ids, titles, aliases, states and categories, with an optional title search, category filter and paging. |
joomrecipe_get_recipe | Returns one complete recipe: every field, ingredients by group, equipment, seasons, categories, tags, and whether the hero image, its crops and the gallery files exist. |
joomrecipe_validate_recipe | Checks a recipe against the active profile without touching anything, and returns the errors, the warnings and the values it would fill in. |
joomrecipe_create_recipe_draft | Creates a new recipe, always unpublished, through JoomRecipe's own Save, then reads it back and compares it with what was asked for. |
joomrecipe_save_recipe | Saves changes to an existing recipe the same way. Anything you don't mention is kept, and it can't publish a recipe. |
Two ways to check a recipe
The Validation profile setting picks how strict the checks are.
- Core (the default) checks only what JoomRecipe needs to accept a recipe: field types and ranges, that the category, cuisine, serving type, tags, equipment, author and access level exist, a unique alias, and readable hero and gallery images.
- Editorial adds your house style on the plugin's Validation tab: title and markup rules, the unit spellings you use, how many tags a recipe has, how the hero image is named, sized and formatted, and SEO lengths. The shipped values are examples to change, not rules.
Installing it
You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and JoomRecipe 6.9, which you buy from JoomBoost.
- Subscribe on the sign-up page ($9.95 a year), or get this and every other Pro add-on with MCP for J Pro — All Access.
- Install it from Components → MCP for J → Browse MCP Add-Ons, or download the ZIP and install it through System → Install → Extensions.
- That's the whole install. The plugin switches itself on, and the tools show up in your AI client the next time it lists them. If you want the Editorial checks, open System → Plugins → System - MCP for JoomRecipe and set them up.
The read and validate tools work on any JoomRecipe 6.9. The write tools need a JoomRecipe that stores empty publish dates as NULL, which 6.9.8 and later do. On an older version they refuse with a clear message and change nothing.
Using it
Try "List my soup recipes" or "Show me everything in the lentil soup recipe". When you have a new recipe, ask for it to be checked first, then created as a draft: the check tells you exactly which field is wrong and why, and the draft lands unpublished for you to look over in JoomRecipe before you publish it yourself. Changes work the same way: "Add a pinch of salt to the second ingredient group" changes that and nothing else.
A few details that matter on a real site:
- Retries can't create duplicates. Every write carries a request id. Set the optional write journal directory, outside your web root, and a repeated request with the same id gives back the first answer instead of writing again. A write that fails part-way keeps a snapshot of the recipe as it was, for recovery.
- Writes run one at a time per site, so two AI sessions can't trip over each other.
- Smart Search stays up to date. JoomRecipe's Smart Search plugin indexes a recipe when it's saved. That plugin can't run under MCP for J's API connection, so the add-on runs JoomRecipe's Save the way its admin form does, and the index updates as normal.
Permissions and security
The tools use MCP for J's own permissions: reading needs its Use permission and every change needs Write. On top of that, the write tools check JoomRecipe's permissions for the person making the request: Create for a new draft, Edit for a save, and Edit State only when the request sets featured, validated or access. Recipes checked out by someone else are left alone, and image paths have to stay inside JoomRecipe's own images folder.
How it was tested
Dragan has run it on Radnička klasa's own recipe site since September 2026. Version 1.1.0 was tested by Cybersalt against JoomRecipe 6.9.8 on Joomla 6.1: every tool was called, a draft was created and edited with Smart Search switched on, and each change was checked in the database rather than taken from the tool's own report. A user without MCP for J's Write permission was refused and nothing was saved. Joomla 5, multilingual recipe sites and the Editorial profile settings haven't been tried by us yet. If your site uses them, start with a validate call, and I'd like to hear how it goes.
Thanks
MCP for JoomRecipe was created by Dragan Subotic at Radnička klasa, who wrote it for his own site and then gave it to us to maintain and share. Thank you, Dragan.
Open source
GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as Joomla itself. The full source is in the ZIP you download.
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