Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 128 - Styling OpenPress

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1842019533470531729 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 128: Styling OpenPress We restyle OpenPress using @shadcn UI... Upload date: 20241004 Transcription model: gpt-4o-mini-transcribe Generated at: 2026-06-01T16:32:19Z

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[00:00] Speaker: All right, we have the ugliest website known to man up at openpress.ai, the first OpenPress website with a post. Now, let's make this less disgusting. Okay, so we're going to use the ShadCN UI components. So it's like, we want something where we can very easily have like different blocks and build web pages out of different blocks and eventually this will evolve to all sorts of different customizable things. But for now, being able to start with well-crafted components with Tailwind, a lot of this I think is React focused, but we're going to extract the React parts and just get the Tailwind and do Blade versions of it. So I made a little doc here. So there's our doc that we did earlier. Here's the doc from now. So we want to create Laravel Blade components based on ShadCN UI components written in React and Tailwind. We are keeping the Tailwind classes as is while replacing React with Blade. Components are defined in the GitHub repo, blah, blah, blah, main branch. Specify this branch when you use the view file tool instructions for our agent. We need to adapt five components. We're going to start with Avatar, Button, Card, Input, and Label. So I want to start by converting this and our create post. Oops, I'm not logged in. Form into ShadUI components. And we also, so we want the new versions to go there. And then we also want to take the color scheme, the zinc color scheme and put it in our Tailwind file. So hopefully if I go grab the relative path of this file and we go back to our open agents, that's the wrong one. Start a new chat. All right, so I'm going to go open agents Inc, OpenPress. We are on the what components branch. And let's just make sure read this and summarize in one sentence. OK, let's try it. Let's say start with the Tailwind config change. Make sure to read ours first and merge ours with the needed variables from there. Support both dark and light mode as class. Hopefully it understands what I mean. OK, so it viewed our Tailwind config. It viewed the base colors on the Shad repo. Now let's merge them together. We'll focus on the zinc color scheme as requested. Here's the updated Tailwind config file. So let's go look at our before and after. We have Tailwind. So this is what we're starting with. And it says it's done. And cool. Oh, but we need to define those variables somewhere, which I guess goes there. Oh, there it goes. It's just before I was like going to tell it, oh, you got to put this there. It's like, no, I'm going to put it here. Import that there. Rewrite that there. Oh, my goodness. Amazing. Did it work? Wow. OK, what's next? What's the first? Let's start with one component. Let's start with... Card is probably more complex because I think that's made up of some subcomponents. Let's start with... Button. Thanks. Now create the button. And while that goes, I will... Log in. If I remember my password. Yeah. OK, let's try converting this thing here into a button. And I'm not going to do the converting myself. I'm going to... Where would I find that? Posts, create button. Face it here. Thanks. Now edit this to use that button. It'll be exciting to explore integrating agents in different ways into like plugins or widgets into OpenPress. I got to think more about the like overlap between the two products. But generally, there's a lot of opportunities, I think, for having kind of AI centric stuff. OK, next. Did it work? No. Oh, I'm on the live site. OK, I have to log in locally. Gosh darn it. There we go. OK, I can't tell what's going on there. Do I need to run this? Yeah. Huh. OK, well, that looks correct. I don't know what happened with the rest of all this. Oh, hang on. Tailwind config. And then out of curiosity, can I force, where do I force dark mode? First of all, are we using this layout? Yeah. So if I put dark here, does that work? Yeah. OK, so if I change the variant on the form, does it have a prop for variant? It does. So if I do variant equals ghost, does that do something? Yes, it does. Excellent. Yeah. Well, that looks kind of crappy just because there's all the blue behind it. But OK, cool. That works. OK, what did I change? Test variants. Oh, there's text area too. We got to add text area. OK, let's try card. That might be the hardest one. Now move in card. May need to split into multiple. You decide. The card component in ShadCNUI is actually split into multiple subcomponents for flexibility. We'll create separate Blade components for card, card header, card title, card description, card content, and card footer. Cool. It's really fun using this, thinking about how much more productive I am with this and how, like, there's so much more that can be improving this Asian experience. It's updating create, but I don't know if it's going to fetch the changes that I made. But the changes don't matter. I just added a variant. All right, let's see what it does. Whoa. OK, I see it. I see it. So now I want it to, on the index, let's see this. Update this to make each post thing a card with a button saying, no, no, no button. Just do that. Updating the button component to support being, I held off asking it to make a read more button, but it just went ahead and did it. It can tell what I'm doing. OK, whoa. Yeah, I don't know if that's the right border color. My gosh. Well, let's do this too. I'm not even going to say what to do there. Just like, you figure it out. All right, so next before making the changes. To make the typography work correctly, you'll need to install, well, that I can do. Comment that part out for now. We have not implemented editing posts. Not hard to do, but yeah. So we've been working on long-lived agents. So like this kind of loop, imagine there being like some agent like this with a supervisor agent that's working according to a plan. What if my plan is like, go find some cool WordPress features? Like, why am I babysitting this so much? All I'm doing is like taking error messages and like pasting them back in, making sure tests pass. Like, a lot of this stuff can be automated. OK, comment those out. OK. What's this up here? Back to posts. That looks weird. OK. All right, so next let's say, put somewhere a button for create post. Then go pull over the rest of the components you didn't yet. Also, I added text area to that list, same path. I love being able to say, put somewhere a button for create post, because the model is smart enough to be able to know what your codebase has in there currently. It can tell it we're making a blog. It can like do something reflecting, well, not necessarily best practice if it's been trained on garbage. But like the median placement of a button, which to get stuff going is like, removes a lot of minor decision making. Got avatar. There's create post. Nice. Get my face out of the way. Updating post creation. Yeah, looking slick. Input and text area both have blue internal rings when active. Change that to white. Now, let's figure out all this background stuff. Where's this coming from? Layout, maybe.

[19:59] Speaker: No, it's not working. But I've solved this somewhere else, and I don't know what I did. You did not solve it. I solved it somewhere in this component. I don't know, you figure it out. Well, with the difference being that I'm not using the CSS variables there. Lastly, you fixed the color, but you hard-coded the exact colors. I instead want you to use the relevant CSS variables from the Tailwind file. After that, I want you to update Boom to also use the same kinds of CSS vars instead of the gray colors. Now we need to add a theme switcher. OpenAgents.com, I've been kind of a maxi about not shipping light mode, but I think we'll do a toggle and let people do dark or light. Man, there's gonna be a lot of cool things we can do with revenue streams, like a marketplace for blocks and things if people are able to build their own blocks like this and be paid somehow if they're used by people's sites. Okay. Oh, but that erased my dark mode, I guess. Nice. Okay, so that got everything except, oh no, it fucked up the... Hang on. And then what is this component up here? Navigation. Update similarly, and whatever change you made to the ring, it's blue again. Fix that. It needs to be the closest thing to white or black depending on dark or light mode. So I think these, I remember from another code base, like the border color isn't being applied for this properly for some reason. We'll fix that in a second. Yes, right now this is border. It needs to say border border. Yeah, border border. I'm gonna do a rebase. Okay. Being able to make code changes while my agent is also making code changes without conflicts is real nice. It's still blue, what the hell? Okay, so what else we gotta do here? Remove the indigo in the navigation. I think that dropdown, we're gonna replace with a shad dropdown, although that might require JavaScript. I don't know that I wanna mess with that right now. Sometimes it is just stupid. Okay, what's next? So the dashboard, what's going on there? Is that app layout? You're logged in. Oh, that's here. Okay, then at least it looks presentable. That doesn't look like the right background color, but I'm not gonna freak out about that right now. Okay, what else we got? Dropdown. Updated the dashboard. Okay. In navigation, replace the indigo gray with our colors and add a top right button that toggles between dark and light. It can add or remove the dark class to parent body tag or something like that. Gotta update those pages. We'll use Alpine.js to handle the dark mode toggle functionality. All right, I'm gonna start a new chat because these are getting to be expensive calls because it's passing in the entire context each time. A lot of optimization still to do. Okay, it works for the header. Toggling it only automatically changes the navigation and doesn't change the whole body until I refresh the page. Not good. Refactor it. Didn't remove indigo. Oh, that's probably a different component. Link or something. Nav link. All right, let's get ready to start a new conversation. I'm gonna say read components tailwind nav link. Text area with the hard-coded border. I guess card's the best example here. Uh-oh. There we go. All right, we got dark and light mode. What was I doing next? Starting a new conversation. So read this stuff. Update nav link to use the new color scheme from card using the CSS vars in tailwind. Okay, what am I missing? I guess we can do the nav pages next. I wanna add the date to posts. Let me log in. What was my account? Okay, that's looking good. Ew. Why can't I see this? A manual change. Yuck. I don't like that colored icon. And boom, replace those emojis with SVGs. Black or white using our color scheme. All right, what should I say about the date? Look at the view page. I don't think I'll need post controller. Maybe I will. I don't know if I'm gonna make sure all the data is passed in. Make the date show on index.

[39:59] Speaker: on post on index like it's showing on show. Now watch this. I can make a second chat. Ah, shit. Did I change the button? Oh, it's the wrong one. There we go. Command click makes a second chat. I hope I didn't mess that up. All right, so I can do this. Now what did this do? It might have made an SVG. Let's see. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I don't like that flash. I wonder if we can replace that dropdown with a shad UI, maybe use Alpine to control it. Otherwise, this is looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Little bit of a weird flashing there. When navigating between pages, I see both render. So there's for a split second, some bad flicker. Refactor that. And it looks like that finished. Cool. I mean, it looks ugly as hell, but it's not as ugly as it was. Uh, I don't know what to do for logo. I guess we'll just use the open agents logo for now. Oh no. What is it doing? Oh no. What did you do? Loading. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Sometimes it gets a little too creative. What did it do? What the fuck is this? No, that's too weird. Remove that overlay and JavaScript stuff. Edit navigation to add this icon. Make a component for it and include it somewhere. Whatever. Dude, it fucked up the dark mode. So one thing I wanna do is, um, get more information in here about what changes are being made so that you can do like rollbacks and better visibility into commits. Uh, the logo currently has black background and a white center part in light mode. That's backwards. Dark mode has white on white background. Must be white on transparent background. Alright, let's see if we can do the dropdown. Look at these things. And the dropdown. The dropdown link. Try to create our own dropdown based on the shad version. Same path. And for any needed JavaScript, use Alpine. That's worth a try. Let's just try it. Looks like it did not remove the overlay thing. I can't see my logo at all. Oh dang. I think I had two agents both editing the nav. That might have messed something up. Oops. That's a bug. It goes to the top when I focus a pane. Come on. There we go. Alright, now I need to be smaller. Oh no. Why does it say open agents? Okay, that's fine for now. We'll get a... bro. That really pisses me off, but I'm not gonna get bogged down about that right now. Okay, what next? How's that dropdown? Oh! Oh yes! We've got a dropdown. Why do I need to click this a thousand times? Alright, let's remove this loading overlay thing. Get rid of that. Okay, so we have to do profile. Wait a second. Where am I? Oh, the nav is... Oh no, no, no. I thought this was done. It's not done. It's still using the old dropdown. Okay. It got overwritten. Read the navigation file again and make the edits again. Why am I clicking this and nothing is happening? Mobile menu. We're gonna remove that for now. Alright, well I'll go through and just tidy up the weirdness of that nav. But, um, you see that it was not hard, less than an hour to like pull in components from a library that, like, isn't even designed to work with Laravel Blade. This at least is an improvement on that. Alright, so I'll finish this up offline. And then, uh, what should we add next? Comments? I think I want to have, like, actual beautiful blog posts. Let's do one more thing. Let's do one more thing. Yeah, so I think the dark mode thing was getting messed up because the mobile menu was, like, breaking it. Alpine was just getting... Alright, couple small tweaks to do. So watch this. I wanna do one more kind of discretion thing where I say, um, so post index... Which chat should I use? This is supposed to be the view of a blog post, but it looks like a normal dumb card. Make it look more like a professional blog post. What's it gonna do? Let's update this file to make it look more like a professional blog post listing. Change the header from post to blogs. Well, let's see. Oh shit, I said index. I meant to do show. Well, let's see what it did. Great. That's something. I don't know what that is. Let's remove it. Okay. That looks great, actually. Post show. So git stash and then... Repeat for boom. Oh.

[59:59] Speaker: Should I just add a placeholder? Whoa! Wow. Okay, that's like a decent enough of a before and after. Should I try to push it? I mean, it's still ugly. No, it's not done yet. It's not done yet. Or should I just say it's done? A little better. All right, let's just merge it just so it's like a little bit of an improvement. And here. Add, Shad, CNUI blade version. And should I deploy it? I'll try it. One thing I like about Forge is that the deploy times, unlike Vercel, don't take like three minutes, LOL. Okay. All right, friends, that is an improvement. Zero comments! Ooh! Delete. Let's just make sure not everyone sees that. Oh, shit. Here's one thing I like to do. Okay, hang on, hang on. Git, check out main and git pull. Let's add the login route real quick. Off to do. For logout, I want also... Actually, I'll just put it here. Route, any. And just make sure. Okay. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay. Okay, you don't see an edit button for my... That looks better. Where's my fucking light mode? Okay, there we go. Nice, huh? Not bad. Not bad. It's a start. See you soon.