MCP for SP Page Builder is a Pro add-on for MCP for J that puts your SP Page Builder pages in front of your AI client. Sixty-two tools cover pages, the JSON content tree โ read it, check it, rewrite it whole, or add, move, retune and delete one node at a time โ plus the section and saved-addon libraries, typography and colours, the media index, versions, Dynamic Content collections, comments and a site-wide health audit. It works with both the Free and Pro editions of SP Page Builder and tells you which one it found, which is less obvious than it sounds: the component's own edition check returns Pro on every site, including sites running Free.
Why this exists
SP Page Builder validates almost nothing when it saves a page. The entire save-side check is a JSON decode followed by a re-encode, and the page table has no validation of its own, so anything shaped like JSON goes in. That's a problem because the renderer isn't nearly as relaxed: five keys in the content tree are read with no guard at all, and leaving one out doesn't make the page look slightly wrong, it makes the page throw a 500. Invalid JSON is worse โ it's stored as the literal string null, after which the page quietly falls back to rendering an old legacy column, which looks exactly like a write that never happened. Every write in this add-on checks the tree against all of those before anything is stored, and refuses on a fatal rather than saving something that will take the page down.
What Claude can do
Sixty-two tools, grouped roughly the way you'd reach for them.
| Area | Tools | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 9 | List, read, create, update, duplicate, publish or unpublish, delete โ plus the page's SEO and Open Graph settings. This covers standalone pages, popups, and the builder layouts behind articles, modules and K2 items. |
| Content tree | 6 | Read the JSON content or just its outline, validate it, write the whole tree, set the page's hand-written custom CSS, and purge the generated CSS cache. |
| Structure | 6 | Surgical edits to one node rather than replacing everything: read a node, add a row, add an addon, change a node's settings, move it, delete it. |
| Addons | 5 | The addon inventory with what each one actually ships, its settings schema, enable and disable, and saved presets. |
| Libraries | 11 | The site-wide stores: saved sections and saved addons, typography, colours, fonts, icon-font assets and image shapes. |
| Media | 3 | The upload index, which is a database table rather than a view of the filesystem. List it, read an entry, update one. |
| Versions | 5 | List, read, create, restore and delete page snapshots. |
| Collections | 6 | Dynamic Content: collections, their items, field types and a full export. Read-only by design. |
| Comments | 4 | List, read, approve or unapprove, delete. |
| Diagnostics | 4 | Component and edition info, a site-wide health audit, and reading and writing component params without the collateral damage Joomla's own Options screen causes. |
| Table access | 3 | A read-only, column-validated query over SP Page Builder's own tables for the question no tool anticipated. |
On the Free edition, most addons render as nothing
This is the single most surprising thing about SP Page Builder, and it's worth reading before you write a page with anything.
SP Page Builder Free renders 17 of its 68 addons. Free and Pro ship the same database tables and the same 68 addon folders โ Free just omits the front-end half of 51 of them. A page whose content references one of those 51 renders as nothing at all. No error, no placeholder, no line in the log. And heading is one of the 51, along with raw HTML, galleries, the form builder and everything Dynamic Content. So the obvious first thing anyone asks a page builder to do is also the thing that comes out blank on a Free site.
Every tool here that writes content refuses such a node by default rather than reporting a successful write on a page that will come out empty. You can override that if you're staging content ahead of a Pro upgrade, but you have to say so.
Working out which edition you're on takes more care than it should, because the component's own edition check lies. isProVersion() is hardcoded to return true in the Free build, so asking the component reports Pro on every site there is. This add-on reads the variant out of the component manifest instead, and then treats the filesystem as the real authority on what can actually render โ because the row existing and anything appearing on the page are unrelated questions here.
One more consequence worth knowing: Free ships none of the integration plugins, so an SP Page Builder layout can't be attached to a Joomla article on Free at all. The plugin that would substitute it isn't there.
Installing it
You'll need Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.2 or later, MCP for J, and SP Page Builder itself from JoomShaper. Either edition works.
- Subscribe above, or get this and every other Pro add-on with MCP for J Pro โ All Access.
- Download the ZIP and install it through System โ Install โ Extensions, or paste your download URL into Install from URL.
- 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 โ 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 actually on the services page?" gives you the outline rather than several hundred lines of JSON. "Add a testimonial row under the pricing section" adds one node and leaves the rest of the tree alone. "Is anything on this site broken?" runs the health audit, which checks the things the component won't check for itself.
If you're new to it, start with the component info tool and the health check. Both are read-only, and between them they'll tell you which edition you're really running, which addons can render, and what's already wrong. Take a backup before pointing the write tools at a site you care about.
Things the tools absorb rather than hide
A few of SP Page Builder's habits will cost you an afternoon if you meet them without warning, so the tools handle them and say that they did.
The main page table is utf8mb3. A single emoji in a title or anywhere in the content tree is either rejected or truncated at that byte, destroying everything after it. The tools refuse it up front with a message that says why, rather than letting MySQL decide how much of your page to keep.
Typography presets are referenced by position, not by id. Content points at "group 2, item 1", resolved by array index against a query with no ordering clause. Inserting, deleting, reordering or even unpublishing a single typography row silently re-points typography across every page on the site. That's why the typography tool is read-only and there's no setter โ it reports each preset's positional reference so you can see the hazard instead of triggering it.
Duplicating a page needs more than a copy. SP Page Builder's own duplicate action copies the ACL asset id verbatim, so the two pages end up sharing one permissions node, and keeps every node id, so the copy's generated CSS selectors collide with the original's. The tool here mints a fresh asset and remaps the ids, while preserving the two internal reference shapes that break silently when they're mishandled.
Generated CSS has no cache-buster. With the component's production mode on, each page's CSS is written to a file that's linked with no version string, unlike every other asset SP Page Builder emits. After a content change, browsers and CDNs holding that file keep serving the old stylesheet โ new HTML, old styling, and nothing obviously wrong to look at. The content write tool purges that file and tells you it did, and there's a standalone tool for when you need it on its own.
What's been exercised, and what hasn't
Worth saying plainly, since you're being asked to pay for it. This add-on was installed and driven end to end against SP Page Builder 6.8.0 Free on Joomla 6, and the core write path, the refusal logic and the security boundaries were all verified there on real data. The library, media, collections and comments tools returned correct results against empty tables but haven't been run against a site with a real library behind them, and the Pro edition hasn't been exercised yet. The tools are written for both editions and the edition detection is the part that got the most attention, but nobody has actually driven them on Pro. If you do, I'd genuinely 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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