A client needed their small team to pull deliverables and timelines out of RFPs
- they wanted to chat with the documents instead of reading 200 page PDFs.
They were already on WordPress with team accounts so that was the obvious
platform. Can we make WordPress do this? Turns out yes, and its not as cursed
as it sounds.
ChatProjects is a free GPL-licensed WordPress plugin for multi-provider AI chat
(OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, 100+ models via OpenRouter) and document
RAG. Self-hosted, bring your own API keys, no middleware, no data leaving your
server except the API calls themselves.
The RAG uses OpenAI Vector Stores and the Responses API and honestly it works
way better than I expected. Upload your docs (PDF, DOCX, code
files etc), they get chunked and embedded into a Vector Store that's created per
project. Ask a question and file_search finds the relevant chunks, generates
an answer with citations. You dont need to run your own vector db or mess with
embeddings or chunk sizes - OpenAI handles all of it. For the "I just need to
search and summarize my documents" use-case its remarkably good out of the box. Storage is
about $0.10/GB/day on OpenAIs side.
Some notes:
- Yes this was vibe-coded (what isn't nowadays?). Its been running in production and it works. I'm sure
there's things that would make a senior engineer wince. PRs welcome.
- WordPress isn't the cool choice, I know. But theres 800 million WordPress
sites out there and alot of them are run by people who need AI tools but
aren't going to spin up a Next.js app with Pinecone and LangChain and ChatGPT / Claude Teams is pricey for medium size teams when all they need is document analysis and basic chat. WordPress admin is the IDE for the rest of us.
- API keys encrypted with AES-256-CBC, messages stored locally in your WP
database. No 'server in between you and the AI providers.
GitHub: https://github.com/chatprojects-com/chatprojects
WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/chatprojects/
Happy to answer questions, and appreciate any feedback!
