Penguin UI's Half-Year Mark: A Look Back and Ahead

How it started

I learned Laravel at my first job and it quickly became my favorite framework for building web applications. Like most developers, I often come up with these great million dollar ideas! (or at least that's what I think) and want to quickly build a prototype or a proof of concept.

If you're familiar with Laravel, you know how easy it is to create a web application, test your concepts, and even scale them up with it. However, there is one hurdle that can slow the process down: the user interface - every back-end developer's worst nightmare and every front-end developer's obsession.

I wanted to simplify UI development for myself, so I began exploring existing component libraries. While I found some excellent choices for Tailwind CSS, including Tailwind UI by the framework's creator, there was a lack of a comprehensive component library that could be fully integrated with the TALL stack (mainly Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js).

There are some UI libraries for Alpine.js, but they either lacked some of the items that I needed or were missing important accessibility features. So, I decided to build my own component library to quickly create Laravel applications.

As I played around with different ideas and features, I found myself getting more and more obsessed with user interface design and front-end techniques. What started as a side project to help me with other applications turned into my main project and the coolest thing I've built thus far.

How it's going?

Although it's not a very well-known library yet, Penguin UI is continuing to grow. Currently, it contains over 170 components that are meticulously built and tested across multiple browsers, devices, and even screen reader simulators to make sure that they work well with different projects.

Additionally, there are 13 pre-designed themes for both dark and light modes, which you can fully customize to match your style.

Recently, I've added a collection of UI components designed for AI applications to help you develop your AI ideas easier and faster.

It has been a blast to work on this library and contribute to the web development world. I'll continue developing and maintaining it, and have some exciting ideas for the future.

Future Plans

Before I start talking about any future plans for Penguin UI, I'd like to say that this library is here to stay. As long as Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js are around, Penguin UI will be too. With that, a sneak peek into some of the exciting additions coming in the near future:

New Components

There is a list of components that will be added to the library, with the most requested items like sidebar, drawer, and toast notification at the top.

In addition to individual components, there will be some collections, one of which will are charts and graphs.

Tailwind 4 support

There are some amazing new features in Tailwind CSS 4, including a new way of defining themes. Penguin UI will support Tailwind 4 shortly after its stable version is released. My goal is to adjust the library to support both version 4 and 3.4.

Full page templates

One of the items on top of my to-do list that I'd love to complete is creating full-page templates using Penguin UI components. I believe this has several advantages: it can serve as a great showcase for the library, and building these pages can help me identify and fix potential integration issues with each component.

Blog and Tutorials

While building this library, I've learned so much about user interface design, accessibility, and how things should work on a website. My goal is to share all of this through this platform.

Although I'm still improving my writing skills, I will do my best to gather all my learnings and share them with other developers through blog posts, infographics, and possibly tutorial videos.

And more, maybe…

As I mentioned, this is an ongoing project with an unlimited number of possible features and ideas that can be built and added to the platform.

While it's not possible to develop every single one, if a feature appeals to me and my users that that seems unique and useful, I will add it to Penguin UI. This way, it will become more than a component library, rather a valuable resource for web development.

Final Notes

Finally, if you've given Penguin UI a try, I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. If you haven't tried it yet, it would mean a lot if you could. Just give it a shot and share your thoughts. Your input will help me improve the library so that everyone can get the most out of it.