Tracy Claude Cowork

The extension Tracy installs on a site so an AI assistant can work on it — read its database, its files and what it has installed, and apply an approved change back to it — over one token-authenticated endpoint.

Every action is named and bounded. There is no shell, no arbitrary file write, and nothing the extension does not implement by hand. Most of the surface reads. The write side installs a plugin, theme or extension, edits a post or an option, puts a file into the media library, and writes a file of the site's own template or theme over the exact bytes the caller says are there — nothing else.

Every change can be taken back. Each edit is recorded under the caller's apply_id, so one call puts a whole deliverable back to what was there before. Installs are the exception and say so: installing is additive, and the CMS owns the uninstall.

Going live is still a decision. Work is drafted and reviewed in a git repository your team owns before anything reaches the running site, and clearing the token revokes all of it at once.

The name is for the way of working, not for a vendor. The endpoint is plain HTTP behind a token, so Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or something you wrote yourself all use it the same way.

Platforms

Folder	Platform	State
joomla/	Joomla 4 and 5	In use
wordpress/	WordPress	In use
shopify/	Shopify	Not started

Each platform folder holds two things a site installs: cowork/, the extension above, and the look Tracy builds a site in — joomla/template/ (tpl_tracy) and wordpress/theme/ (tracy). One template and one theme, each carrying 152 design inspirations as styles, so a site changes its whole look by changing one setting.

One repository rather than one per platform, and one engine per platform inside it. Each platform owns its own lib/: they start as copies of each other and are expected to drift, because tuning for an old WordPress must not be a change Joomla has to survive. Side by side in one repository is what keeps the interesting decisions — how work is cut into resumable pieces, how a cursor survives a request being killed — comparable while they diverge.

One package per platform

<platform>/cowork/ is the extension a customer installs on their own site, and it is the only thing in here. update.xml and update.json sit beside it at the platform root because a site records that address when it installs the package, so those paths are a published contract.

A second plugin used to live here — Tracy Access, the auto-login for a Tracy-hosted copy of a site. It moved to tracy-fleet (provision/access/) on 2026-08-17: it is installed only by provisioning, on a clone, and it creates users and opens sessions — nothing a customer downloads should sit next to. Keeping it here also meant maintaining a second copy in the fleet repository, which had already drifted.

The template and the theme

joomla/template/tpl_tracy/ and wordpress/theme/tracy/ are mirrors, not sources. They are generated in Tracy's own repository from a vendored design library — 152 token sets, 152 style variations, the page layouts and the section markup — and copied here by node scripts/sync-cms-themes.mjs <this checkout> over there. Nothing in those two directories is edited here: an edit would be overwritten by the next sync, and the gate that proves the generated files match the library does not run in this repository.

What does belong here is the release:

node scripts/release-joomla-template.mjs   0.1.1   # tag joomla-template-v0.1.1
node scripts/release-wordpress-theme.mjs   0.1.1   # tag wordpress-theme-v0.1.1

Each reads the version out of the mirrored tree and refuses when it disagrees with the number asked for — the number is decided once, in the repository that generates the tree.

Four release lines, one repository. joomla-v* and wordpress-v* are the extension; joomla-template-v* and wordpress-theme-v* are the look. They never collide: provisioning resolves the extension by tag prefix and version range (git ls-remote --tags 'wordpress-v0.6.*') and a site resolves its look through the update manifest, so neither ever asks GitHub for "the latest release" of the repository as a whole. A look release is cut with --latest=false for the same reason: that badge is repo-wide and belongs to the extension, which is what a person coming here installs first. It writes the announcement (joomla/template/update.xml, wordpress/theme/update.json), builds the zip, tags, and creates the release. A site installed with the update server recorded then finds the new version by itself, the same way the extension does.

Nothing is pushed to main, a release included. Every change reaches it through a pull request. The three release scripts (release-wordpress.mjs, release-wordpress-theme.mjs, release-joomla-template.mjs, sharing scripts/release-pr.mjs) and the Joomla extension's release by hand all take the same path, in this order, because installed sites read the announcement on main every quarter hour and must never see a version whose zip is not downloadable yet:

1. commit the announcement on a branch release/<tag> and tag that commit;
2. push the branch and the tag;
3. create the GitHub release on the tag, with its zip;
4. open the pull request to main and merge it with a merge commit (gh pr merge --merge, no squash, no rebase, no --admin), so the tagged commit is in main's history.

If the merge cannot happen — a conflict, a failing check — the script stops and says so: the release exists, but no site is offered it until the pull request merges. Its message says how to finish (fix it, gh pr merge <pr> --merge) or roll back (gh pr close <pr> --delete-branch, gh release delete <tag> --cleanup-tag). --dry-run checks and builds and publishes nothing.

What it is for

Tracy keeps a git repository of a site: every article, page and template as files, with a history you can read, compare and roll back. This extension is how the site gets in there, and how an approved change gets back out.

Both directions run through it, and they are not the same act. Bringing the site in happens on a schedule and needs nobody's permission. Putting a change back is one deliberate call per approved deliverable, recorded so it can be undone — coworkers draft and review in the repository first, and only an administrator decides what goes live.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later — see LICENSE.txt. An extension built against Joomla's own API is a derivative work of GPL code, so this is the licence it must carry rather than one picked by preference.

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Claude is a trademark of Anthropic PBC. This is built by Tracy and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Anthropic.