The Harbor Ledger: a local news site with sections, bylines, a breaking banner, live updates and feeds
The website for a fictional local newsroom: a newspaper-style front page, section fronts, reporter pages, a breaking news banner switched...
For each Raytha use case we take a realistic brief, hand it to an AI agent with the raytha CLI, and publish what
comes out: the site, the files behind it, and a kit you can use to rebuild it yourself. This one is the website for
a nonprofit membership association: what members get, the membership tiers, a directory of local chapters, events,
news, and a resource library that only members can open.
The agent built it on a fresh Raytha 2.0.1 instance. Nobody opened the admin. Every template, content type, item, page, user group and menu went in through the CLI, from files in a directory.
What was built
Commonground is a fictional national association for community gardeners, with eight local chapters. The site has:
- A home page with the member benefits, the next four events, the four membership tiers, the largest chapters, the latest news and a call to join.
- A membership page with the tiers side by side, three ways to join and a membership FAQ, plus a page for each tier and a comparison page.
- A chapter directory with a dotted map of the country, a pin for every chapter, region filters and a card for each chapter with its members and gardens. Each chapter page shows its lead, when it meets and its upcoming events.
- Events you can filter by format (in person, online, hybrid) and by audience, so members can find the members-only webinars. Past events drop to a "Recently" list on their own.
- News with topic filters and a large lead story.
- A members-only resource library: toolkits, legal templates, guides and webinar recordings. Anyone can see what is in it; only signed-in members can open a resource. Members also get a "My membership" dashboard.
Joining. The site does not take payments. Every Join button goes to an external membership partner, marked with an external-link icon and a note saying so (it is a placeholder link in this example). There is also a contact path for people who want to talk to someone first, and a suggestion to come to an open event before joining.
The design is warm and outdoorsy: paper-coloured backgrounds, deep garden green, clay red and mustard. Headlines are set in Fraunces, a soft serif with italics for emphasis, and text in Public Sans. The garden illustrations are flat SVG scenes generated for the site, so every image is license-free. On a 390px phone the tiers stack, the map keeps its pins and the menu folds away.
How the members area works
Raytha has user accounts and user groups built in, so the members area needs no plugin and no code outside the templates:
- The build creates a members user group. People who join are added to it as Raytha users.
- Members sign in on the site's own login page, which uses the same theme as the rest of the site.
- Templates check the signed-in user's groups. If the user is in members (or is an admin), the resource page shows the full text and the download button. Everyone else sees a short summary and a panel asking them to sign in or join.
- The "My membership" page greets the member by name and lists the library and the members-only events.
Because the check happens on the server, the members-only text is never sent to visitors who are not signed in.
Features, and the Raytha features behind them
| Feature | How it is built |
|---|---|
| Tiers, chapters, events, news and resources | Five content types from one schema document. Events use a relationship field to their chapter, a date for the start and dropdowns for format and audience. Tiers have a checkbox for the highlighted tier. |
| 35 seed items | Content import from JSON Lines. Events point at their chapter by name, and the illustrations are uploaded during the import. |
| Chapter directory, events, news and the library | List views with Liquid templates. Filters come from query parameters (?region=, ?format=, ?audience=, ?topic=, ?kind=), checked against the allowed values. |
| Chapter map | Each chapter's state places a pin on an SVG map; totals are added up in the template from each chapter's numbers. |
| Members-only resources | A user group called members. Templates read CurrentUser.UserGroups and only render the body for members. |
| Member sign in | Raytha's built-in login, with the login templates restyled to match the site. |
| Home, Membership, About, Contact and My membership | Site pages built from 12 custom widget templates (hero, benefits, tiers, events, news, chapters, call to action, page header, FAQ, ways to join, text with quote, contacts). |
| Navigation | Two menus: the main menu and a footer menu. The footer also lists the chapters straight from the content. |
The brief
This is the brief, as given to the agent.
Build a website for a nonprofit membership association on a fresh Raytha instance with the
raythaCLI. No clicking around the admin.
Look and feel
- Visually impressive, with a design of its own. No wide display fonts.
- Responsive. It has to look good on a phone as well as a desktop.
Content and pages
- Member benefits, membership tiers, events, news and a chapter directory.
- No payments. Joining can be a clearly labelled external link or a contact path.
- A members-only resource area that uses Raytha login.
Done means
raytha checkpasses with no broken routes.- Screenshots of the result on desktop and mobile, and a walkthrough video.
- A kit in the examples repository that rebuilds the site on a fresh install.
How long it took
About an hour of agent time, from an empty install to raytha check passing on every route, including the visual
design, the generated illustrations, the members area and writing the tiers, chapters, events, news and resources.
Rebuild it yourself
The theme, schema, seed content and illustrations, page definitions and menus are in the
raytha-examples repository,
with a build.sh that rebuilds the whole site into any Raytha 2.x instance. Point it at your site with
RAYTHA_URL and RAYTHA_API_KEY and run it. The build creates the members group; add a user to it to see the
library unlocked.
