Show HN: ChatProjects Open-source WordPress plugin for document RAG and chat
github.comA 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!
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