Welcome to the ‘Collaborative CMS’: Directus Breaks the Bottlenecks with its Native MCP

I’m not sure if it was “Espresso Yourself” or “Latte Whiskers” that really hooked me, but the headline prompts for the fictional Coffee and Cats blog were the cat’s meow.

If you’re confused (or feeling the effects of the catnip), let me clarify: This was just one of my positive reactions to a blazing-fast Directus MCP demo that conjured a cozy little cat-themed blog collection with some article content.

Truth be told, I’m not a cat person. More of a dog dude. But that’s OK. The 90 seconds of feline frenzy that resulted in “latte art” worthy of your grandmother’s wall of plates would make anyone purr. 

Directus MCP creating a blog collection via Claude. Source: Directus

Velocity was just one dimension of the magic. The other was the prompt-powered simplicity that conjured the performant fixtures into existence. But this is precisely the kind of innovation I’ve come to expect from Directus, which has been steadily chipping away at the content management mold. 

More than a headless CMS, Directus is a data platform that enables backend-as-a-service capabilities for building and shipping apps, with access to dynamic APIs and some keen governance tools and resources. Scott Brinker called it iPaaS, but it’s really evolving beyond the confines of a single category.

They’ve also been on an innovation roll, buoyed by a Series A round of $7 million in 2022. Last year, we covered the launch of its Directus Marketplace, which provided a strong foundation for its composable future. Its Directus Cloud also delivers a package of serverless simplicity and is now supporting a large pool of users. And with 40 million downloads and 33,000 GitHub stars, it’s clear that people love exactly what it’s doing.

When Founder and CEO Ben Haynes demoed his product during our “CMS Idol” competition at the 2024 Boye & Company CMS Kickoff – taking home the crown with a dynamite presentation – it was clear that Directus was cut from a different cloth. Never one to hold back, Ben has frequently challenged the market with his vision, and he’s once again asking some thought-provoking questions about the intersection of go-to-market and developer teams.

The rift between these cohorts isn’t a new problem. Design and development were once walled gardens that products like Figma have helped to break down. As Ben said in a recent LinkedIn post, it was the friction in the middle that created a scorching case of cat scratch fever on all sides.  

With AI, that friction can now be eliminated, and with natural language acting as the universal translator. Marketers and developers can have the best of all worlds, working together in a highly collaborative manner. 

“The AI doesn't replace either role,” Ben said. “It eliminates the friction between them.”

Maybe it sounds a bit reductive to suggest that the friction vanishes into thin air. There are always new interoperability hills to conquer. But Directus is making the climb in a new direction. Powered by its purpose-built platform and new Directus MCP capabilities, they’re realizing a vision for what they call the industry’s first true “Collaborative CMS” – bringing together marketers, developers, and AI to eliminate the bottlenecks that have held everyone back. 

As Ben said, it’s not automation that’s unlocking the possibilities. It’s collaboration. 

Breaking the bottlenecks

Model Context Protocol is having a moment. A big one. The open source standard for connecting AI applications is spreading across the stack, and I’ve covered multiple announcements over the last few weeks from vendors touting new MCP servers – each with its own use cases and roadmaps.

Why does MCP matter? For starters, it can marshal agents to access all kinds of apps, acting almost like a personalized AI assistant. You can use Claude Code to create web apps from a prototyped Figma design, or chatbots that connect to multiple databases, data sources, and tools that can enhance capabilities and improve the end-user experience. The possibilities are vast.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I have an outsized proximity to this technology, having participated in an AWS Hackathon in July that focused on MCP and enterprise agents. I’m deeply familiar with the framework and its evolution from Anthropic – and I’ve seen first-hand why it’s opening up huge possibilities, especially in the agent-to-agent frontier.

I also tracked the explosion through the composable community, hearing the first toe-dipping exploits late last year and through “The Composable Conference” in April, where agentic commerce was making waves – and MCP was shifting the tides.

From a digital experience perspective, we all know the kinds of relevant scenarios where AI can make an impact on bottlenecked workflows: Marketers need stuff, so they submit tickets to their development teams. There’s a backlog, further tweaks and requests, and the whole machine grinds to a slow march.

In this day and age, go-to-market strategies can’t be hamstrung by these kinds of delays. Marketers need to be nimble, but developers are still essential to creating dynamic experiences. This is where the Directus MCP is delivering the promise of collaboration. It uses AI as a translation layer to help bridge the gap between creative and code.

One of the examples that Directus provided in its overview uses a natural language prompt, illustrating how a content editor can say, "Import this blog post from Google Docs into my articles collection.” The cool part is that AI understands both the creative intent and the technical schema, providing entries that are properly structured with all the correct field types, relationships, and validation. 

"We're not building AI features to replace people. We're building it to make collaboration effortless," said Rijk van Zanten, CTO and Co-Founder at Directus. "The real breakthrough isn't that AI can generate content. It's that AI can finally speak both languages fluently: marketer and developer. That's what unlocks real collaboration."

In the end, developers retain control and visibility without plugging things up, rapidly prototyping data models and building automation with natural language. Content creators also get the velocity they need to meet market demands, using LLMs and AI to migrate and manage content – and create at will. 

With Directus, this collaboration happens in real-time and with full transparency. Behind the scenes, AI manages the exchange between human intent and database structure, ensuring that firmaments like permissions and validation rules are maintained. 

Designed for extensibility – and simplicity

Directus MCP can be used with the leading stack of AI tools, including ChatGPT, Cursor, VScode, and more. In five minutes, you can enable it through your Directus instance settings, generate an access token, and connect the tool of your choice. It’s all natively integrated, so there’s no crazy middleware, external services, or complex setup required. 

Once you’re spun up, you can connect things like existing SQL databases to Directus, allowing MCP to securely access and work with you data through your LLM of choice. You can model complex data structures in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee or feed your cat. The ideation starts here, but can clearly go in a multitude of directions.  

Directus MCP harnessing ChatGPT 5. Source: Directus

I’ve taken a solid tour of the Directus MCP documentation, and it’s solidly organized. All of the architectural tenets are accounted for, from schema management to automating workflows, and they all respect the rules and relationship constraints. AI assistants use authenticated API access with granular CRUD controls. 

Source: Directus Documentation

One thing I really like is the repo of available tools and the ability to create reusable prompt templates for consistent AI actions. You can standardize responses, create guided workflows, and help provide guardrails for consistent content creation. 

On Directus TV, the company’s video-centric resource center, you can get access to an MCP starter kit and watch an in-depth series that details every step of the journey – from installing Claude Desktop to building landing pages with AI assistance using the Directus MCP. There’s some great content here, and I love how Directus provides this level of hand-holding through specific applications and use cases.  

The “collaborative” verdict

Call it a tangled cat’s cradle, but collaboration ought to be a given with all enterprise software tools, especially a CMS or DXP. Even now, we’re struggling to create a truly complete picture, and organizations are still choosing between tech-forward platforms that leave marketers harangued and more user-friendly tools that stymie developers. 

Sure, we’ve made progress in healing the broken social contract between headless and legacy CMS tools (vis-à-vis the introduction of visual editors), but even now we see the rift.

Directus has consistently gotten out ahead of these problems. By focusing on a more uniform fabric that brings everyone together – from dynamic APIs for developers to visual previews for marketers – their platform is creating a more holistic foundation, and one that MCP is now enhancing.

The idea of a “Collaborative CMS” is simple and elegant. It’s based on logical tenets that reinforce the human value in the equation while empowering teams with AI – and giving everyone what they need to work together more effectively. It's also aspirational without dismantling the engine of content management that's powering the core.

"We've never believed teams should have to choose between developer control and user accessibility," Ben said. "MCP adds the missing piece: a platform where technical and creative teams actually work together instead of taking turns. That's what makes it collaborative, not just convenient.”

This is an important distinction with Directus’ approach to MCP. As I mentioned, every tool is launching its own server, and it’s becoming more of a commodity that, in some cases, is projecting more AI washing. What matters is how a platform is harnessing it. 

In the case of content, it’s not about producing more at scale or creating metric tons of “AI slop” that reduces the quality and impact. It’s about enabling both marketing and development teams to work more seamlessly towards a strategic outcome by breaking down walls and accelerating the entire process. A marketer can use natural language to ask for what they need, and AI ensures that the request meets the technical requirements set by developers. Everybody wins.

Given Directus’ unique position as an ecosystem of headless CMS and BaaS capabilities – powered by dynamic APIs – they’re in a unique position to leverage an MPC at a broader scale, where users will have a lot of composable latitude to experiment. It’s early days, but I suspect we’ll see additional agentic features rolling into the platform that build on this momentum.

Don’t let the cat get your tongue. You can schedule a demo here.

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