Build a site with an AI agent
Install the CLI, hand your agent a brief, and review what it builds.
Each week 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 week: a three-day tech conference.
The agent built it on a fresh Raytha 2.0.1 instance. Nobody opened the admin. Every template, content type, item, page, menu and function went in through the CLI, from files in a directory.
What was built
Horizon Summit 2027 is a fictional conference: April 13–15, 2027, Austin, Texas. The site has:
- A home page with a full-bleed animated hero, a live countdown, a topic marquee, featured speakers, the five tracks, key dates, a three-tier sponsor wall, the latest news and a save-the-date band.
- An agenda that filters by day and by track, shown as a timeline grouped by day, plus a keynotes-only view.
- A speaker directory and a page per speaker that lists every session they appear in, including ones they co-present.
- A page per session with time, room, level, speakers, more sessions from the same track, and an Add to calendar
button that downloads an
.icsfile. - Track pages, a sponsors page grouped by tier, news, venue and travel, and an FAQ.
- Site search across speakers, sessions and news.
- A members-only Attendee Hub. Signed-in members of the
attendeesgroup see Wi-Fi details, workshop setup notes and the venue map. Everyone else gets a sign-in prompt. - Restyled sign-in, 403, 404 and 500 pages, so nothing falls back to the default look.
It is a dark theme: Space Grotesk for display type, Inter for text, JetBrains Mono for times and labels, a violet-to-orange gradient, glass cards, and a little motion (drifting gradient blobs, a sunrise glow over the hero, cards that lift on hover, grayscale speaker photos that turn to colour). It is responsive down to a 390px phone.
Features, and the Raytha features behind them
| Feature | How it is built |
|---|---|
| Speakers, sessions, tracks, sponsors, news | Five content types from one schema document. Sessions use relationship fields to a speaker, an optional second speaker and a track, plus dropdowns for day, room, format and level. |
| 50 seed items with photos and logos | Content import from JSON Lines. Relationships refer to the related item by name, and each photo or logo is uploaded to the media library as its row is created. |
| Agenda with day and track filters | A list view at /agenda sorted by a numeric sort key. The Liquid list template reads ?day= and ?track= from QueryParams, validates them, builds a filter and calls get_content_items. |
| Keynotes only | A second list view at /agenda/keynotes with a saved view filter (format eq keynote), rendered by the same template. |
| Speaker pages that list their sessions | The speaker detail template queries sessions with speaker eq '<id>' or cospeaker eq '<id>'. |
| Session pages, more from this track | The detail template follows the track relationship for its colour and name, and queries the other sessions in it. |
| Sponsor wall in three tiers | One query, grouped into platinum, gold and silver logo grids in Liquid. Used on the home page as a widget and on /sponsors as a list view. |
| Home, venue, FAQ pages | Site pages built from 14 custom widget templates (hero, marquee, stats, featured speakers, tracks, key dates, sponsor wall, news, CTA, page header, FAQ group, feature cards, venue, rich text). Each widget has a settings form, so an editor can change the copy in the admin. |
| Add to calendar | A Raytha Function with an HTTP trigger at /calendar/session.ics?id=… reads the session through API_V1 and returns an iCalendar file with the right time zone. A second function serves the whole event at /calendar/horizon-summit-2027.ics. |
| Agenda JSON feed | A third function at /calendar/agenda.json returns the published agenda as JSON, optionally filtered by day. |
| Attendee Hub | A user group (attendees). The page template checks CurrentUser.UserGroups and renders the members-only section on the server only for members. Non-members never receive that HTML. |
| Search | A site page whose template reads ?q= and runs contains() filters over sessions, speakers and news. |
| Navigation | Two menus: the main menu (get_main_menu()) and a footer menu (get_menu("footer")). |
The brief
This is the brief, as given to the agent.
Build a website for a fictional annual tech conference, Horizon Summit 2027: three days in Austin, TX. Build it entirely on a Raytha instance with the
raythaCLI. No clicking around the admin.
Look and feel
- A striking custom theme that looks like a premium conference site, not a template: a bold full-bleed hero with an animated gradient or mesh background, large expressive type (a Google Fonts pairing), a rich dark palette, subtle CSS animation and hover effects, glass or card depth.
- Polished speaker photo grids, an elegant agenda timeline, a logo-wall sponsor section.
- Responsive. It has to look good on a phone as well as a desktop.
- Free or placeholder images only.
Content model, with realistic seed content
- Speakers (about 12): bio, job title, company, photo.
- Sessions (about 20): linked to a speaker and a track, with day, start and end time, room and format.
- Tracks.
- Sponsors in platinum, gold and silver tiers.
- News and announcements.
Pages
- Home: hero, key dates or a countdown, featured speakers, a sponsor wall.
- Agenda, filterable by day and by track (list views and query parameters).
- Speaker directory, plus a page per speaker that lists their sessions.
- A page per session.
- Sponsors, Venue and travel, FAQ.
Functionality
- A members-only Attendee Hub page, gated by a Raytha user group.
- Site search.
- Navigation menus.
- Optionally a Raytha Function for something useful, such as an
.icscalendar download per session or a JSON feed of the agenda.
Done means
raytha checkpasses with no broken routes.- Screenshots of the result on desktop and mobile.
- The schema and theme exported so the site can be rebuilt or deployed elsewhere.
How long it took
About 30 minutes of agent time, from an empty install to raytha check passing on all 63 routes, including the visual design work and the screenshots. The content model and seed data were the quick part. Most of the time went into the design.
Rebuild it yourself
The theme, schema, functions, seed content, 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.