Total CMS 3.5.0 RC1 has Automations and MCP

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-06

[00:00:04]How you doing today?

[00:00:07]Make sure I get thumbs up in the chat that uh audio and visuals are good.

[00:00:15]Excellent.

[00:00:17]Josh is here. Mr. Workman's in the house. David Franco. Uh oh. Chris Troublemaker's here. Willie, thanks for popping in. And of course, Matias.

[00:00:29]Good wishes from Germany.

[00:00:37]You guys hear me? Let me get some something in the chat.

[00:00:46]Strange echo with the audio. We have sound. Does everyone else have echo?

[00:00:51]I can reduce my gain a little bit. Dr. Bob's here. There we go. Look, now I'm seeing everything in the in the stream.

[00:00:58]Perfect.

[00:01:00]Cool.

[00:01:03]Um, so if you didn't see on the community last night, I released a released candidate one total CMS 3.5. So what that means is that uh no more big features. I have locked it down. um 3.5 is big enough and um I'm sure there are a lot of people would like to me to add a bunch of other stuff, but um we gota we got to cut the cut the uh cut it when we can. Okay, because uh yeah, there's already a lot of stuff in there. So, today I'm going to be uh focusing on two things. Um I know last week I wanted to do MCP, totally missed the uh the cut off time to do a live stream on it. And then even on Friday, um my Mac did not like me on Friday. So even if you join the hangout on Friday, um did not get to see MCP. So some of you this will be your first time seeing MCP even though I launched it last week. Um and then the new thing for this week with the RC1 is automations. So that's going to be uh some pretty cool stuff.

[00:02:07]Um okay. Uh it's actually quite warm. I'm going to turn my fan on really quick. Uh just so I have a little bit of cool off because there's we're going to get hot in here cuz there's a lot of really amazing stuff to show off today. Let me go turn my fan on.

[00:02:28]Okay. Um without further ado, let's just jump on in. Okay. Um if you haven't seen a lot of stuff with 3.5, there's a lot of new stuff. I'm not going to even try to review the breath of everything. Um I guess I maybe at the beginning I can give a quick overview of some things.

[00:02:47]Okay. Um you know what? Pretty soon we're going to have to have uh some some guest live streams because um there are some guests that Josh and Chris who are both here today um and Johan if Johan is here. Um all three of them has have made some really amazing extensions. Um, and that's one of the big features of Total CMSs 3.5 is there is now a new extensions manager. Um, and what you're seeing here are all of the really amazing extensions. Okay.

[00:03:19]Uh, I talked about some of these last week um on the live stream. Uh this actually this RC uh release has um a much nicer protect and scheduled stacks uh or extensions. Um and then maintenance. Okay, so some really cool stuff there. Um yeah, some really nice these are all built-in ones that you will get that come with total CMS. Um Aolia search isn't necessarily ready for prime time. That will not be a free extension though. Um that one will be a paid extension. I don't know the details of it. It's not really ready yet. So, it's there. As even said, it's labeled as beta. Don't try to use it yet. Okay.

[00:03:57]If we have time today, maybe I can jump into some extensions if you guys like to see how some of them work. Okay. Um, but extensions are the big ones. Josh and Chris, I think combined they have, I think like 15 extensions between the two of them, and I think Johans's made two.

[00:04:16]I don't know. Um, so a lot of really cool stuff. We're going to have to get each one of them on to the the stream.

[00:04:22]Um and uh and yeah, show they can show off their stuff. Okay. Um next week though, I'm sure if you want to see it even faster than uh when we can do it on live stream, next week is the summit.

[00:04:35]And uh yeah, I I got to let's let's hold bring it back really quick. Summit big time. Next week. Um so next Friday to Sunday is our summit. This year's summit. Uh hopefully you've gotten the emails with all 14 talks.

[00:04:51]Some really awesome stuff here. Um I've been going back and forth with the speakers. We've come up with some really just amazing topics that I think are seriously on point for what we need to learn and know in 2026 for building websites. Um highly into stacks, total CMS, and AI. every talk is going to be talking about AI because uh yeah, if you ha if you're not on the AI bandwagon, you're gonna have to be um especially after what you see today with MCP. Um hopefully that will that will uh definitely wet your appetite to see what will be possible using total CMS and AI in the future. Okay? Or actually right now, not even the future, right now.

[00:05:33]Okay. Okay. Um Summit Weaver Space/Summit. Go get your ticket now. 99 bucks. Um, and I'm throwing in a free light edition of Total CMS, which essentially makes the entire event $20.

[00:05:49]So, uh, nobrainer, I think. So, go out and get it. Weaver Space Weavers.space/summit.

[00:05:56]Get your ticket. Okay. Um, next up, uh, LA. Oh, um, so you might be seeing a lot today of me doing this, um, uh, command shift O. Okay. And that opens up this quick open and you can kind of like navigate around to various things and quickly go places and whatnot. So, uh that's a really awesome uh I think a really great new tool. Um really reduces the clicking around and how to get around total CMS uh admin dashboard. So really excited about that.

[00:06:33]Um there is a new site builder uh which is right here. Okay. Um, this is where you can actually build out web pages and templates. And I'm definitely not diving into this today. Um, so if you haven't seen this, go ahead and watch a previous uh stream and uh you can kind of see the overview of this. Definitely not diving into that today. Okay. Uh there's a lot of cool stuff in there though. What we are going to dive with in with today h let me know in the chat. Do you guys want to learn automations first or MCP?

[00:07:02]I think maybe we should go into automations first. uh just purely because I think it's going to take less time. Okay. Um and uh it's what I shipped today. So uh there is a new tab uh in the release candidate called automations. It's right here.

[00:07:19]And what will that do? So let's go ahead and add a new automation. I guess first I should well let's talk about what an automation is. Okay. Um the automation is uh now it is this is definitely on the more advanced side of things. Um, this is you automating things in total CMS. Okay, so and that requires you to write PHP, okay? Or it requires you to tell AI to write PHP for you. It's up to you. Okay. Um, but yes, it uses PHP and um there's a lot of hooks. Um, there's a lot of great documentation on on all the APIs that you can use in here. You can essentially do anything. You can fetch a collection, you can create objects, you can do all kinds of stuff. You can update objects. Um, so a lot of really awesome stuff that you can do in here.

[00:08:06]Pretty much anything you can imagine you could probably do. Okay. Um, I've enabled most of the APIs, even some of the private ones inside the automation handler, so you can really um, get down and do exactly what you need to do.

[00:08:20]Okay. And it's all managed inside of Total CMS. Now, how do you run these automations?

[00:08:26]So, there are um, multiple ways you can do this. You'll notice that there is a deck here called triggers. Let's go ahead and add a trigger. And um you can have multiple triggers. That means you can trigger an automation potentially in multiple different ways. So you can do a schedule which is cron. Okay. So you can do a schedule job. So let's say you want to run this particular automation on a scheduled basis. Maybe every day or every 20 minutes if you want. Okay? Or every January 1st, right? There's so there's all these automations that you can do. You can schedule these out uh to run whenever you need to.

[00:09:00]There is also a web hook. So that essentially means um you can uh hit a URL do an HTTP request. Um you can do this from a form. Okay. So you can even integrate this into total CMS form actions or foundation 6 form actions, right? There's all kinds of stuff that we can integrate this with. Web hook is a very generic um thing around the web.

[00:09:24]Um so you can definitely integrate with that. You can integrate this into active pieces and zap year as well. So this gives it a very flexible way. Now with web hooks we can uh give it um whether or not you want to run this via an API key is required whether or not it could be without an API key but has to be on the same website so the same domain. So this could be maybe if you're using it as a form action but you don't want to necessarily create an API key. And the next is you can have it wide open so that anybody can um you know hit this web hook. Okay.

[00:09:54]Um oops there was one more. And the next is event. Now what is an event? So this is kind of like um eternal or internal not eternal internal events within total CMS. So whenever total CMS performs various actions there's all kinds of events that we can get triggered. So like object created object updated collection created template saved user login user logout right there's all kinds of stuff. clash uh cache cleared, dev mode enabled, dev mode disabled. So whenever any of these things happen, okay, you can have this automation ran.

[00:10:34]Now you can also limit it by uh collection as well. So if you want you could be like if a object is created in the mailer collection then run this automation.

[00:10:46]Okay, pretty cool, right? So this gives us a lot of flexibility. You can have and you can have as many triggers as you want. So if you want multiple events or it multiple schedules I don't think makes much sense. Okay. But u multiple web hooks um that probably doesn't normally either uh schedule and web hook you would you could have one of them right? Um so you'd have a web hook you'd have and multiple events. So there we go. You can have multiple triggers. So multiple things can trigger this. Now, also another thing you can do is uh let's go ahead and just um let me save save something super quick and easy.

[00:11:22]Actually, I think I have think I have an example here of my other demo area.

[00:11:28]Oh, I do. Okay. So, um I already have one um loaded in here. It's super simple. It doesn't really do anything.

[00:11:33]Um it just kind of quickly returns.

[00:11:36]Okay. And here uh we have a button. Now I can run this. So I could be like I want to click that and I want to run it and it was successful. And down at the bottom you can see all the various ways this was ran and when they were ran. Um so this particular one was just right now it took 1 millisecond and it was manually triggered. Okay. But you can see this there was schedules there was events there was all kinds of things that was going on and how these events um Scott says he can't use JS. That's funny. Okay. Um, so yeah, uh, you can kind of see the history of all your runs, whether or not they were successful or failed. Now, what's really cool is up here when if you have multiple automations, they'll all be listed down here on the side, just as you know, everything else is in throughout the the dashboard. But the status of the last run is always going to be displayed. So, the last run here was successful. So, you get a green check box. Okay. Um, if it failed, you'll get a a a warning symbol, right?

[00:12:37]So you you can quickly see at a glance without having to go to each one which ones the last run was it a success or a failure. Pretty cool.

[00:12:48]Now other things um with every automation you can set up a mailer. So inside of mailer in here you can set up an email template and um it could be unique for each automation. So you can set up an email template and then just select that and if there's ever an error, okay, it can email using that email template and that email template can define who it's going to go to, what the subject is, all the content, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, so yeah, very cool, very powerful so that you can obviously get alerted when something goes wrong. Very important.

[00:13:25]Okay.

[00:13:27]Um, and like I said, that's pretty simple. Automations are well uh the explanation of them is simple, right? Uh implementing them and figuring out what you want to do with them um is another thing that's on you. Okay, you now have the power to do all kinds of really cool Sorry stuff.

[00:13:44]And um it does it does mean that you have to have PHP. So, um yeah, there we go. If there's any questions, let me know in the chat and I will uh I can answer them. But without further ado, I'm going to keep moving along. Okay.

[00:14:03]Next up is MCP. All right. Now, without before I d totally dive in, um let's chat a little bit about what in the world MCP means. Okay. Um and MCP means uh oh shoot, was it uh model context protocol. Okay. So that's what MCP stands for. and think of MCP as a way for your app to integrate with um AI. Okay? Well, not necessarily your app, but total CMS, your instance of total CMS.

[00:14:44]So, um I've given this explanation before. Let me do it. It's really quick.

[00:14:48]I think it's a good explanation of the difference of why we're using MCP. Okay.

[00:14:55]For a long time, AI uh was integrated into apps by developers. And what that what what I mean by that is inside the app that you used had like mostly it was a chat widget and that developer would integrate with an AI service. So what I mean by that is um let's say I have an app I then integrated with Open AI or Anthropic or any of the other AI agencies that have APIs. I can then utilize their APIs and tokens to then add artificial intelligence into my application through their through my direct integration.

[00:15:41]Now that is integrating AI into your app.

[00:15:48]So what MCP does is how it's different is MCP is a standard protocol and it allows me to have a standard integration with any AI agent that implements that standard protocol.

[00:16:06]In layman terms, that means it's a standard language that any AI agent knows how to talk to my app. And in this case, my app is on your server. It's total CMS. It's not really my app anymore. It's your app because you build Total CMS to contain the content that you want.

[00:16:28]So, it's not necessarily uh integrating with Total CMS. It's integrating, it's using Total CMS to build an MCP server to integrate into your data.

[00:16:37]So, this is really cool. Now, I am I I'm gonna be the I'm gonna say I'm the first person on the internet that said this. I'm gonna take full credit for it. I said it last Friday, okay? And um as on the Hangouts, we were talking about um Google's keynote last week. I don't know if any of you have watched um Google's keynote from Google IO, but they talked and they re unveiled the new go the new Google search. And the thing is it wasn't search at all.

[00:17:09]It was an AI agent. It didn't return search results. It didn't let you browse for anything. It gave you what it thought it needed or it thought what what you needed, right? It it just gives you the answer just like an AI agent does.

[00:17:26]Now, it can site with little links and and I do appreciate that. Um but it essentially just gives you the answer.

[00:17:34]Okay. And so the question is how is how's SEO going to be affected? Now I don't want to take all the thunder from people from next week. Uh there's some really great talks that are going to talk more in depth about this subject than what I'm going to right now. Okay?

[00:17:52]But MCP is SEO. Now let me repeat that again. MCP is SEO because uh and I think you'll I think that will you'll understand that when I do the a live demo because AI agents will now know how to they don't need to scrape web pages and try to figure out what your site does when we have an MCP server because the MCP server knows how to talk to the agent uh very nicely and at that point the agent agent will then converse with your MCP server to learn more about you or to learn more about your business or your products or whatever you have. Right?

[00:18:40]So, I don't think necessarily it might completely replace traditional SEO. I think it's just going to be added on to, right? So, we're still going to be expected to know good SEO for our web pages, but if we have an an MCP server, like that's going to be your MC your SEO superpower. And I eventually it's probably going to be the only way to do it. My guess. Okay, I think I'm right.

[00:19:07]So, um, while I didn't plan all that, when I when I planned on building MCP into Total CMS, like, wow, I uh I definitely feel I nailed where we're going. And um I definitely think feel that um each total CMS instance will now be an MCP server and you can have your own MCP server with pretty little setup.

[00:19:29]Okay. Now um with that with that said, I think you you've heard me chat and ramble on about what MCP is long enough. Let's go ahead and dive in and show you how MCP is configured.

[00:19:45]Now, there isn't one place to configure MCP because um it's kind of integrated throughout the entire CMS and let me show you um let's show you what it is. Okay, so John, you said do you have a link to to to all this to explain in plain English um you want to if you're learning want to learn about MCP? Um uh I don't have a link right now. Um you can look at the total CMS docs. Um and that is in hopefully plain English.

[00:20:20]Okay. Docs.talcmss.co.

[00:20:23]Uh here I will throw that in the chat.

[00:20:36]Um so check out that link, John. Um okay.

[00:20:40]So, in settings, uh, there is an MCP server setting. Okay. And in here, it's going to have some a couple important things. First, it's going to give you your actual MCP URL. Okay? Uh, if your URL will be different depending on if you're if you have a STAX published website or if you're using total CMS standalone. Um, this particular instance is my dev server. Actually, you know what? For right now, let's go ahead and go into this server since this is the one we're going to actually be using today.

[00:21:12]Okay. Um, so yeah, it'll give you your your URL. You can go ahead and copy that. Okay. Um, Whoops. I I need to make sure that that is a little bit bigger.

[00:21:22]Um, the discovery URL. Um, this is something that, uh, is not necessarily a URL you need to actually know directly.

[00:21:29]I kind of have it here, but it it's there is an auto discovery. It's kind of like a your your site map for MCP. Okay.

[00:21:37]And agents can look for that.

[00:21:40]Um, next up is uh MCP uh enable it. So you can actually completely disable MCP if you know you don't want it. You can completely disable it right here. Okay.

[00:21:51]Then um the rest of these tools I'm not going to dive into right now. Um it's either you can allow full public access to every M MCP endpoint. It's up to you.

[00:22:00]Um, corores if you want to limit it to particular AI agents. Um, tool prefixes.

[00:22:06]This is if you want to kind of customize the generic tool names that uh, Total CMS creates and make them your own.

[00:22:13]Okay, so basically if you look here, if you have a tool name of Beastro uh, if you look at the tool tip, you can have like instead of list collections, it'll be Beastro list collections, right? So you can kind of brand the the MCB tools.

[00:22:26]Um, I'm gonna probably using some terminology that um is definitely a lot of there's a lot of new terminology around MCP and I probably won't have time or I I probably will glaze over some of them. Um, a tool think of it as kind of like a API endpoint. Okay, so it's it's a way of querying um you know different functions that the MCP can use in your instance. So for example, there is a list collections tool um and this particular tool prefix allows you to rename the built-in tools um to be customized to you. So you can have beastro list collections or you know products list collections or weaver space list collections, right? So it just prepens all the built-in ones with your own prefix. Okay. And enable resource subscriptions. Um we'll talk about those a little in a little bit. you can completely disable those, although I'm not really sure why you would want to be honest with you.

[00:23:26]So, there we go.

[00:23:28]Okay, so that's just the settings. Uh, let's dive into I think we'll start in schemas. Uh, that's kind of where everything starts in Total CMS. Um, I guess I should also note that MCP um in order to utilize uh the custom MCP stuff, it all requires um Pro. Okay. So, um if you want the MCP server, it is a pro edition. Um so, there we go. Uh let's look at blog.

[00:24:02]All let's look at a custom collection just so we can see a custom collection here. Um so, in a collection, it is very important first off that you give it a good description because as you saw there are some generic tools such as list collections. Now, if uh if you go in and you properly describe what every collection is, it makes um the AI agent understand what each one is for and what every what everything actually does and what its uses are. So, um having taking the time to do really good descriptions for your collections and properties um is going to be very important. Now, if you want, you can leverage AI to help you do some of these mundane these mundane tasks. Okay? And uh a lot of people have already done that. Okay. And apparently it works really well. So here uh is a description for just it's the standard description field for your collection. Next up is we can go into each individual property and uh as you will notice there is a new MCP details uh accordion and this is where you can give a description for this property to MCP. So this is a full description about what this property is, what types of data it contains, so on and so forth, how this property should be used, right?

[00:25:26]So it's a full description of what this property is to the AI agent.

[00:25:32]Now another thing is there is a checkbox to expose to MCP. If you uncheck this, that means this property is now invisible to the MCP server. So, for example, password fields, secret fields, um that type of of those fields that contain potentially some sensitive data, those are hidden by default from the MCP server. But if you ever have any other data that you would like to hide from MCP, you only want to keep it private inside total CMS, you can go ahead and make sure that exposed to MCP is turned off.

[00:26:10]And that's it from the schema perspective. Again, it's all about the descriptions.

[00:26:16]You want to describe uh your schema, describe your property. Very important.

[00:26:24]Okay. If there's any questions, please go ahead and and add them into the chat.

[00:26:27]I don't think we've gotten into anything complex yet, but make sure that you put that in there and I'm happy to answer them.

[00:26:34]All right, let's go into collections now.

[00:26:39]So here I have my blog collection and let's go ahead and edit this collection.

[00:26:46]And now when we edit a collection we scroll down and we'll see that there is an entirely new section for our collection for MCP server.

[00:26:59]So here you can say what level of access who has access to the data in this collection. Do I want it to be public?

[00:27:09]Do I want it to be admin only? So, it requires an API key or do I want to make sure that the user is authenticated um with something called OOTH. So, there there's a few different ways uh that we can provide access to. Um so, we can gate it with a user that we've added into this intotal CMS. We can make sure it's admin only with an API key. Uh or we can give full public access.

[00:27:37]Next is um search. Now for right now, you only have access to one search type within um with the MCP and that is the built-in search with the total CMS which is its built-in textbased search. But as I said as I as you saw earlier with the Alolia search plugin, there could potentially be more search providers that you could integrate. So, um, I kind of built this in the with the future in mind that we're going to have different ways of of doing better or types different types of searches um rather than just the default text search that comes with total CMS.

[00:28:12]Next is we have uh we could provide a description for our collection. So, what is this collection? What type of content is within it? Then we have that expose as a resource. And what resources allows us to do, it allows the MCP client or the your chat to subscribe to a collection or a particular object in the collection. And um in order to do that, it needs to be a resource. So, it's basically a way for a an AI agent such as chat GPT or Claude to um basically identify a very specific object via a very specific kind of URL syntax that is not an HTTPS blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. um is a very special unique URL looking format that allows MCP to um communicate with AI agents about particular resources such as collections or objects.

[00:29:17]Okay, next up are custom tools. So, I talked about earlier how there are standard tools and actually for fun I will bring up um give me a second.

[00:29:40]Okay. Um I have this little tool that I have running locally on my Mac. Um and it is not something that's built into Total CMS. It's not built by me. Um, it's just kind of a cool little MCP debugger. Okay. And the reason I'm I'm doing this is uh I'm going to go ahead and connect to um I'm actually going to connect to this MCP server uh which is um this one but online. Okay. And uh let's go ahead and say I want to go to tools and we're going to say list tools.

[00:30:11]And voila. Okay. So here's a bunch of tools that out of the box um Total CMS provides.

[00:30:20]So there's some obvious things such as clearing cache or creating a collection, creating an object, right? Describing a collection, um getting getting an object, getting a resource, getting a schema, so on and so forth, creating schemas, listing views, getting data from views, listing collections, there's all kinds of querying a collection, searching a collection. Now, here we have recently published. Okay, this is not an out-of-the-box tool. What is this tool?

[00:30:49]So this tool is a custom tool that um you can actually build yourself.

[00:30:58]So inside this collection um we can now uh there's a deck in here called custom MCP tools and this allows me to create my own tool.

[00:31:11]You can give it whatever name you want and a description. And then here you can like limit uh you can provide various parameters that your tool is going to take and various filters that your tool can provide.

[00:31:24]Um and essentially this is a way of providing or searching through collections. So um this is again in my blog collection I can say give me all recently published. Okay. it's going to be uh draft uh false. So I I I don't want anything that has a draft of false, right? Um the the user can request a limit. They can give a parameter that says give me 1, five, 10, whatever. I I do have a maximum set of 20, but you can lift that to have a different maximum.

[00:31:58]Okay, the default is five if they don't provide a limit.

[00:32:02]So then down here you can say uh what's my my kind of the default um max results. So I max is 20 which is kind of also mimicked up here.

[00:32:15]We have the offset. We can say uh the data that's sent down is it is it provided via markdown, HTML or plain text.

[00:32:23]Um and then sort because this is recently published. I want to sort based on the date and I want it in descending order. Okay. Now you can also have include and exclude which is um exactly like the include and exclude filters that we have throughout various aspects of total CMS. Okay, they're documented.

[00:32:44]We use those in loops. We use those in RSS filters. There's a lot of different ways where where total CMS uh supplies this include and exclude logic. It's the same exact logic everywhere in terms of syntax. Okay. Um, so you could include, let's say you wanted to only have particular blog posts that were maybe featured or maybe um, you know, only in a certain category, stuff like that.

[00:33:08]You can you can do that with the these include and exclude filters.

[00:33:13]Okay, so you can add add as many of these tools as you want. And again, these tools are custom specific just for this one collection. So um if I say hey give me the recently published posts it's going to know that this tool is going to connect to this particular collection and it will provide and process data for this collection.

[00:33:37]Okay I think some of this will be a little bit confusing until you actually play with it. Okay and we will I'll show you a real live example in a little bit.

[00:33:49]There is one more act uh one more thing that we can do and that is there is now a a new special collection called MCP prompts.

[00:34:00]This collection gets created out of the box and in here you can um create your own prompt templates.

[00:34:13]So let's go into uh what I mean by that.

[00:34:19]So this particular prompt template is called house style post. I can give it a description. You you target a particular collection with a prompt. You can give it access like who who can run this particular prompt. So in this particular one, this will this prompt will actually create blog posts.

[00:34:39]Therefore, I want to make sure that it's only admins that can do that.

[00:34:44]You could provide um arguments. So um think of this as like a function call where you can actually provide multiple arguments. And argument is pretty simple. It's just a uh a name of your argument and a description of your argument and whether or not it's required.

[00:35:00]Okay, you have as many arguments as you want. Then in your prompt body, this is the prompt that will be sent to the AI agent.

[00:35:15]All right. So let's say I'm typing in my chat and I say I want to create a house style post about so XYZ.

[00:35:24]What that will do is that's going to use this prompt template. It will then create this template. Now if you notice this template actually contains twig. So you can actually use here I'm injecting the the topic. Okay, that is passed via the arguments. You can also use twig that gets data from other things, right?

[00:35:42]So you use Twig that generates a prompt.

[00:35:47]That prompt is then sent down back down to the agent and chat GPT or Claude will then process that prompt, do what you requested and then there we go. So these MCP prompts are prompt templates. They're a way of having like pre-made prompts that you can use to um get better results through your MCP server.

[00:36:19]Okay, and that's pretty much it. That that's the last bit of MCP. Um I don't see any questions. I know you're probably a lot of like deer in the headlights. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and jump into a live demo.

[00:36:37]Okay, demo time. No, I don't want spam callers. Okay.

[00:36:49]Okay. Let's go ahead and go to actually, you know what? We're gonna do a We're gonna do a new chat.

[00:36:57]All right. First off, actually before I do um chat here, I want to explain what we're doing. Okay, so I'm going to let's go to platform.totalcmss.co.

[00:37:14]Okay, this is a fictitious website that I created. Um, and this is the MCP server or the total C CMS instance that we're going to be querying. It's a fictitious design studio um that yeah I just created to do a demo of MCP. This cascade studio um has a blog which is called a journal here. Okay. Uh every blog post has various blogs. Okay. We have work which is a kind of a um some of their selected projects that they're currently working on or have worked on.

[00:37:50]Uh we can go to the about page that shows us the about page. We can go to the services page which then shows us what their services are and whatnot.

[00:38:00]Okay. So it's just a very simple studio a very simple website that all of this data is managed by total CMS.

[00:38:10]Okay. Just to show you here we'll go ahead and I will log into the admin So here's the admin. Here is the blog posts that we have. Um here here are the prompts okay that we have okay schemas so on and so forth. So all of that data that we saw if we go into services here's all the services that we have okay so this is all live online. It's an active total CMS um instance that uses MCP.

[00:38:46]So, what we're going to do is I now when starting a completely new chat from scratch um doing the initial connection.

[00:38:54]So, I I guess I should say that I did configure um this MCP already. So, if you here I'm in Claude. Um you'll notice that here I have a MCP for Cascade Studio. Um and basically when you configure it, you just give it an API key and that URL. Okay. I have gone into uh if you go into utilities and API keys, you can create your your API keys here.

[00:39:23]Okay, I forget which one I'm using. I think it's this one. It doesn't really matter. Okay, so I created an API key that allows me to do get and post. And the endpoint is there's an all MCP endpoint that you can select. So this particular API key is only scoped for MCP. That's it.

[00:39:44]Okay, let's get back to it.

[00:39:48]All right, so um let's just say I am looking into uh Cascade Studio.

[00:40:01]Um can you tell me a little about it?

[00:40:08]Okay.

[00:40:10]So, that is going to um again the very first connection it kind of makes. Now, I I could have opened up an existing chat that I've already kind of tested.

[00:40:18]Um but I I wanted to do something completely from scratch for for you guys. So, yeah. Um it uh it's now going ahead and figuring out what Cascade Studio is.

[00:40:35]It discovered that we have an MCP server for it. And there it goes. Now it's connecting to the MCP. It's getting some some site info. And you know, while this is going, let's go ahead and I want to I want to talk about another uh feature that I kind of skipped. Okay, it's not MCP related, but um it's workflow related.

[00:40:56]So in here, um this, as I said, this is the online version of the the site that we're working on.

[00:41:05]this one that we've looked at that I was in earlier. Um, this is the local version of this website. It's running locally on my Mac.

[00:41:15]And I think there's a a lot of um, you know, workflows that where you kind of deploy things locally and you work on them and then when you're happy with it, then you publish to your server, right?

[00:41:28]That's a lot of workflow that we're used to. Okay? Okay, whether or not it's using preview or um you know publishing it locally and using something like map or something like that. Okay, so how can we improve this workflow especially with something like total CMS where like um the data isn't inside stacks, right? So you publishing it from stacks doesn't necessarily send up any sort of like schemas or um other configurations that you've set up locally.

[00:42:02]So how do we get all of that that information that we've worked probably really hard on and publish it to our servers? You could go ahead and manually copy up files. Could totally do that.

[00:42:13]But now there is a new and better process.

[00:42:16]So let's go into the sync manager. Okay.

[00:42:19]Now, first off, in order to set up the sync manager, you go into settings and you go into sync data. And in here, you give it the URL to your production server and an API key. The API key, you would create that API key on your production server.

[00:42:37]Once you set these up, you can now sync data. So, we're going to go into utilities, sync manager. And now what what we can do here is I can go ahead and select let's say all schemas or I can select certain schemas or certain templates or certain pages or mailer email stuff or MCP prompts and we can sync that up to our production server.

[00:43:07]So at that point just to kind of show you what that looks like uh I don't want to sync these templates. So uh I'm just going to do these schemas for now. We're just going to say push to production.

[00:43:15]Say okay. And it's syncing.

[00:43:19]And it's done. And what that did was um it actually went through and it updated these schemas that we had um dynamically. Okay. So pretty cool. Um it dynamically pushed up new versions of these schemas. If the schemas didn't exist, it would actually create the schemas. So pretty cool workflow.

[00:43:42]Okay.

[00:43:44]And Claude is being slow.

[00:43:49]Awesome.

[00:44:13]Let's go ahead and stop that live demo. The demo gods are not on my side.

[00:44:30]We're doing better than I was last Friday, though. Um, my machine was completely hosed.

[00:44:46]The request may have expired. Refresh the page and continue. H interesting.

[00:44:51]Let's go ahead and uh let's go to connectors. Go into here.

[00:44:58]Uh can I Oops. What's it doing there?

[00:45:15]What did it do there? It's not what I wanted.

[00:45:19]Customize connectors.

[00:45:23]This bad boy. There isn't like a reconnect.

[00:45:29]Let's say uh can you reconnect to the MCP server?

[00:46:04]Uh Franco asked a question. So the fact that you uh define a connector to your server is it does it avoid uh I believe you know getting stuff from online? I don't think so. Um just because I have an MCP server doesn't mean it it it only ever looks in that one place. But obviously it's going to use that MCP as kind of its source of truth, but not necessarily its only truth. Um, at least that's what I've found in my experience.

[00:46:35]Especially if you tell it to venture out and find something else.

[00:46:43]Oh boy.

[00:46:48]Let me go ahead and one second to make the demo gods a little kinder to us. Let's I'm going to load in this chat. Okay.

[00:47:14]Um, so here's a chat. Um, I just kind of said, "Hey, tell me a little bit more about Cascade Studio." And it came back.

[00:47:22]Um, or I said here about the services from Cascade Studio. Okay. And, uh, it went connected to the MCP server, found all the brand. Okay. Um, the audits and whatnot. Okay. And, um, yeah, it kind of gave me an overview of of all of the services. I then said, "Hey, what are some projects that they've done?" and it listed out all the projects. Oops, didn't mean that. Right. So, it listed out a bunch of projects that they worked on. Um, I said, "Hey, tell me a little bit more about this project." All right, which was right here. And then went ahead and uh gave me some more details about that project. Now, I I wanted to focus in on kind of a detail of that project. And I I noticed that Sarah Chen was the lead. Okay. And so I I asked um what else has Sarah Chen done? What has she worked on? And um it it then looked up all the all of the uh projects and it found that she had worked on these two projects which is quite nice. Okay. So it kind of went and then it got me more details about those projects and things that Sarah did for those projects. Okay. Um and then asked, "Hey, can you help me create a blog post?"

[00:48:39]it uh did create a blog post um or it created the blog post uh but then a few days later I actually uh added the ability for it to actually create the blog post inside the the total CMS instance right um so here we go um this was me kind of working with it and if we look over now if we go this is the online version if I go into uh blog uh this one right here uh the one that doesn't look like dummy data okay this was created by the MCP server. Okay. Um, one thing I will note, the MCP cannot add images. It can only create text content.

[00:49:18]Um, so I added this image afterwards, but everything else was created by that by the MCP. The categories, the tags, the summary, all of the blog post content. Um, it was purely created just by me chatting with um the MCP. Uh, which is really cool. So, um yeah, that should give you kind of an idea of what um the MCP can be used for. Again, this is is all about um using your data and your workflows to integrate with AI.

[00:49:54]So, this again this feature isn't necessarily about integrating total CMS into AI, right? Like, you know, help. Now I will say this this can create schemas and it can create collections and it can help you do creating of your data um you know on your total CMS instance but it is all about creating um you know integrating with your data and building your content within the CMS.

[00:50:23]This will not replace the the MCP docs server that we have that tell that teaches AI how to know about total CMS and help you maybe implement and maybe learn more about schemas and collections. So really if you were to have both MCP servers like if you were actively building a site and actively building content um using total CMS you definitely want to have both. you'd want to have your MCP server configured and then the the generic total CMS MCP server that tells and teaches MCP all about the total CMS APIs and things that it can do. So, um it's just a way of kind of bridging the gap between an agent now knows total CMS and then now it knows your data and how to implement total CMS in your environment.

[00:51:12]So um that's a quick overview of MCP and what it can do for you. I think we're in exciting times. Uh I definitely feel that um as I said earlier hopefully you can see this how what I mean by how MCP is SEO now or it it can be or could be in the future. Um I don't think it's going to necessarily kill off um that but uh traditional SEO. But if you want to hear more, Chris is doing uh already putting together an amazing talk next week um at the conference and we're going to be really talking about, you know, SEO um for 2026 and beyond. And I I I really feel in the last week from actually having my creating an MCP server and using it and you know playing around with it and seeing where search is going um it being completely agent-based that this can only benefit you and uh I think total CMS makes it pretty simple um to build out an MCP using your own MCP server to serve up your data. So, I think it's a no-brainer. Um, uh, I don't know of other any other CMSs, at least right now, knock on wood, that, uh, that does this. So, I'm really excited about it. I think it's a differentiator in the market. I think it's really going to bring a lot of really cool attention to Total CMS. So, um, if you know any, uh, web designers out there that's looking for uh, something interesting, um, send them to Total CMS. I think it'll be pretty cool. Okay. Um in a rag retrieval augments generation, it is essential to avoid hallucinations to provide quality and reliable search outcomes.

[00:53:01]Well, if you tell your um the agent to only use your MCP, um then it's not going to venture out. um that's a function of the m of the the AI tool, not necessarily MCP. That makes sense, right? So if you tell AI to only connect to MCP and use your server as the only place to get that particular information, then it shouldn't most of the time. AI sometimes doesn't always always listen to you, right? So um but in theory, if AI listens to you, which most of the time it's pretty good and it's getting better, um it will obey those rules. um from from my experience.

[00:53:42]Okay, cool. Well guys, I hope this gives you a little peak into where things are going um and how awesome um total CMS 3.5 is.

[00:53:53]Oh, let's see. How much space will this use on our server? Um the MCP doesn't use any extra data that isn't necessarily already used.

[00:54:05]Okay. So, um yeah, I mean there are some obviously there's the all the code for MCP um which actually is I mean we're talking megabytes maybe tens of megabytes I don't know. Um and then in terms of data um I mean there's probably some caching uh you know I never thought about that in particular. I don't think it's anything that is uh you know exuberant in terms of hey you the MCP is going to use up a lot of disk space. Nope. Um it it leverages and uses the data that you store in total CMS. So however much that data is um it's not going to be much more than that to expose it to MCP.

[00:54:52]Okay. Doesn't require an extra database.

[00:54:54]The data is already there. So we're just using what what we already have.

[00:54:58]Uh, which is uh pretty awesome.

[00:55:02]Good question, Dave. Okay. Um, well guys, I think I'm going to call it quits. I'm actually actually absolutely starving and uh I need to go get some food.

[00:55:14]So, go ahead and download uh release candidate 1 if you want to play with uh some of this MCP stuff. Um, I've already seen some people already implemented it on their sites and they did minimal work. Um, and uh, AI was intelligent enough to really figure out the stuff without them taking the time to put in descriptions yet, but they've been working on the descriptions, and I think it's going to provide even better details for them. Um, Chris has updated um, Stax Guru already. Um, so I haven't had time to play with that MCP much yet, but um, I know he's launched it and it works. We play um uh we were playing around with it as he was configuring it and um yeah, he he made it do some funny stuff. Um so uh yeah, he he was he was making fun of me. He was having AP MCP make fun of me. So uh yeah, how many times I messed up and it was basically it returned something like to be honest with you pretty much all the time.

[00:56:15]and it like counted the number of times I said oops and it was crazy across all the videos. It was um it was very interesting. So um yeah, pretty fun stuff.

[00:56:28]Where are all the CSSJS when using site builder?

[00:56:34]So when using site builder um all the CSS and JS files are managed outside of the site builder. So, um you would add them into the assets folder. Um I guess here I can give a quick very quick rundown. Uh this particular Oh, I'm not sharing anymore.

[00:56:53]Uh this particular site here is built with site builder. Okay. Um so if I go into websites platform.

[00:57:05]All right. So um in here, let's go ahead. Let's chuck this into VS Code.

[00:57:14]Um, so in here, uh, essentially, um, I'm kind of doing level two. I'll show you what level one is. So, in the public folder, there's an assets folder, and you just add in your, um, assets in here. Uh, if you look at this, if you look at the site builder docs, it shows you then once you put a file in here, how to import it onto the page. Okay?

[00:57:35]There's a CMS.assets something. I forget what it is off the top of my head. Okay. Um, now I uh am there is if you install this via command line, okay, you can install what's something called the front end and it'll give you a little templated area here where you can have CSS kind of a more traditional front-end build environment where um this uses Vit, which is kind of like the the new kit on the block for build tools. Um, and it will compile down uh CSS and JavaScript files and it'll automatically put it in these locations. If you notice, these file names are kind of funky. it automatically does that and it generates this manifest file which then total CMS knows how to read. So um yeah um if if you want to use this this uh way I recommend this way. I like it but it's very developery. Uh but you can also just manually plop in asset uh CSS and JS files into your assets folder.

[00:58:32]So that's how that's uh done if you're using the site builder.

[00:58:41]Okay, sweet. Okay, guys. I think we're going to call it quits. Um, have a great day.

[00:58:48]Uh, hopefully I'll see some of you on Friday uh at the hangout and uh hopefully some of you have played around with the MCP by then or the automations.

[00:58:57]Love to hear some feedback. Take care everyone. Have a great rest of your week. go out there and make your websites great and you can do even better if you go and get a ticket to the summit which is next week. Okay, so weaverspacesummit and uh get your summit tickets. So take care everyone. See you guys next.