MCP for Page Builder CK is a free add-on for MCP for J that puts your Page Builder CK layouts in front of your AI client. Thirty tools cover pages, the block tree inside a page, rows and columns, styles, saved elements, fonts and the .pbck backup history, so you can ask what's actually on a page, or move a block, without opening the builder. It works with the free Light edition and with Pro, and it reads and writes the stored markup using Page Builder CK's own bundled parser rather than a substitute — which matters more than it sounds, because a Page Builder CK page isn't JSON. It's raw HTML with every block's options hidden in custom attributes.
Why this exists
A Page Builder CK page is markup in a database column, and every option on every block is an HTML attribute on an empty sibling div. That's fine while you're in the builder clicking things, and awkward the moment you want to know something about the page as a whole. Which blocks are on it? Are any of them inert? Which style rows is it linked to? The builder answers those one click at a time, and the rendered page won't answer them at all. This add-on hands the whole stored structure to your AI client to read, and gives it surgical edits — add a block, change one, move it, delete it — that put the rest of the markup back exactly as they found it.
What Claude can do
Thirty tools, grouped roughly the way you'd reach for them.
| Area | Tools | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 7 | List with filters, read one in full, create, update, publish or unpublish, duplicate, delete. |
| Block tree | 8 | Get a page's outline, pull one block with its options, check the content is well formed, write the whole thing, and add, update, move or delete a single block. |
| Rows and columns | 2 | Add a row, and change a row's column split. That geometry is recorded in four places at once and collapses if they disagree, so it gets its own tools rather than being left to a text edit. |
| Styles | 4 | List and read style rows, see which styles a page is linked to, and change that link. |
| Reference | 4 | Categories, saved elements and the installed fonts, all read-only. |
| Backups | 2 | Browse the .pbck snapshot Page Builder CK writes on every save, and restore one. |
| Diagnostics | 3 | Component and edition info, the addon inventory cross-checked against what your pages actually use, and a site-wide health audit. |
Installing it
You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and Page Builder CK itself — the free Light edition is enough, but it needs to be version 3.6.5 or later. See the security note below before you install anything.
- 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. "What's on the homepage layout?" returns the outline rather than a wall of HTML. "Move the video block above the accordion" does that and leaves everything else byte-for-byte alone. "Are any blocks on this site using addons that aren't installed?" runs the audit, which is worth knowing because the rendered page will never tell you.
Writes are careful in three specific ways, and each one is a quirk of the component rather than a design choice. Every write re-parses what it's about to store and refuses if the round-trip isn't identical, so a tool can't quietly reformat markup you didn't ask it to touch. Style options written by a tool are inert until someone opens the page in the builder and saves, because the code that turns those attributes into CSS never runs on the front end; functional options apply immediately, and each tool says which kind it just wrote. And the builder hardcodes alias, ordering, state, category, author and access level on every save, so anything written to those columns survives only until the next human Save — again, the tools say so rather than letting you find out.
One thing to know about the backups before you rely on them. Page Builder CK takes its .pbck snapshot before its own save, so the newest backup is the previous version of the page, never the current one. "Restore the latest backup" is an off-by-one that throws away a save. The restore tool tells you which version you're actually about to get.
A missing addon fails open, not blank
This is the single most useful thing to understand about Page Builder CK, and it's the opposite of how SP Page Builder behaves. When no enabled plugin provides a block's type, Page Builder CK renders the block's inner markup as plain HTML with its CSS still applied. No error, no placeholder, no log line. Light ships 11 of the 29 addons, and heading and button are among the Pro-only ones, so a page built on a Pro site and moved to a Light one can look almost right while several of its blocks do nothing.
Since the output can't tell you, the tools check every block's type against the plugins that are actually enabled and report the mismatches. They warn rather than refuse, because the content isn't broken — it's just inactive, and that's a decision for you rather than for a tool.
Permissions and security
Update Page Builder CK to 3.6.5 or later before you do anything else. Versions below that carry remote-code-execution flaws that are being actively exploited. CVE-2026-56290 scores 10.0 and is on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list with public mass-exploitation tooling, 3.6.0 only partly closed it, and 3.6.3 and 3.6.5 fixed two further issues. These tools install and run on older versions and will warn you, but patching comes first.
Font handling is where that attack surface lives, which is why list_pagebuilderck_fonts is read-only and there's deliberately no tool here that writes a font. The tools also refuse oversized style content and astral characters up front rather than letting MySQL truncate a value mid-write, because the component's tables are utf8mb3 and its style column is 64 KB rather than the long text you'd expect.
What's in the Pro add-on instead
Export and import, the saved-block library and presets are Page Builder CK Pro features, and they ship separately in MCP for Page Builder CK Pro. Those tools refuse unless the vendor's own Pro build is installed, even though they could be made to work without it. Everything on this page works on the free Light build, and nobody should be asked to pay us for access to an extension they already have for free.
Open source
GPL-2.0-or-later, the same license as Joomla itself. Source lives on GitHub.
Add comment