Agent Skills

EmDash publishes agent skills for AI coding assistants. A skill is a folder of instructions and reference material that an assistant loads when a task needs it. With the EmDash skills installed, an assistant follows current EmDash patterns for schema, queries, plugins, and the CLI.

Skill	Use it for
building-emdash-site	Schema and seed files, content queries, Portable Text, menus, taxonomies, deployment
creating-plugins	Sandboxed and native plugins: hooks, routes, storage, admin UI
emdash-cli	Managing an EmDash site from the command line
wordpress-theme-to-emdash	Porting a WordPress theme to an EmDash site
wordpress-plugin-to-emdash	Porting WordPress plugin behavior to EmDash

The skills are published in the emdash-cms/skills repository with each EmDash release.

Skills in EmDash templates

A project created with npm create emdash includes building-emdash-site, creating-plugins, and emdash-cli in .agents/skills/, with a .claude/skills link to the same folder. A plugin scaffolded with the plugin CLI’s init command includes creating-plugins. Assistants that read those folders load the skills without further setup.

These copies stay at the version the project was created with. Install the skills from the repository to update them or to add the WordPress porting skills.

Install the skills

Any assistant

The skills command installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and many other assistants. Run it in your project:

npx skills add emdash-cms/skills

It asks which skills and assistants to install for. Add --skill <name> to choose skills up front, or -g to install for your user account instead of the current project.

Claude Code

Add the repository as a plugin marketplace, then install the emdash plugin:

/plugin marketplace add emdash-cms/skills
/plugin install emdash@emdash

Claude Code names the installed skills with an emdash: prefix, for example emdash:building-emdash-site.

Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Factory Droid can also install the repository as a plugin. The skills repository README lists the command for each one.

Note

The WordPress porting skills link to building-emdash-site and creating-plugins. Install those two alongside them.

Update the skills

In Claude Code, run /plugin marketplace update emdash, or turn on auto-update for the emdash marketplace in /plugin. With other assistants, run the install command again.

Report a problem

The skills are maintained in the skills/ folder of the EmDash repository. Open issues and pull requests there. The emdash-cms/skills repository does not accept them.