Next JS & Open AI / GPT: Next-generation Next JS & AI apps

The instructor welcomes the learners to the JS and Open AI course, where they will be building a fictional software as a service product called Blog Standard. Blog Standard is a basic SaaS product that allows users to purchase tokens, which they can redeem to generate SEO-friendly blog posts using Open AI. The course covers everything needed to build a SaaS product, including using Next.js for the front and back end, Tailwind CSS for styling, Auth0 for handling user accounts, MongoDB for data storage, Stripe for payments, and OpenAI GPT API for generating blog posts.

The instructor provides a quick demo of the app, starting with the landing page and signing up for the Blog Standard app. Users need to purchase tokens to generate blog posts, and Stripe handles the payments. Once the payment is successful, the user can generate a new blog post using targeted keywords, and Open AI generates the content. The generated post is SEO-friendly, with a title, meta description, targeted keywords, and content.

The instructor recommends connecting with them on LinkedIn and joining the WebDevEducation Facebook group. The last lecture contains all the links necessary to connect with the instructor. The instructor looks forward to kicking off the course in the next lecture by setting up the Next.js project. This course is a great opportunity to learn how to build a SaaS product and covers all the essential features needed to do so.

In this lecture, the instructor explains how to set up the Next JS project for the course. He has already created a starter repo containing the minimum necessary to quickly set up the project. The starter repo includes a set of npm packages that will be used throughout the course, Tailwind CSS setup, and boilerplate code to connect to MongoDB. The boilerplate code for MongoDB is taken directly from the MongoDB documentation. The instructor uses Visual Studio Code as the editor and creates a new next app based on the starter repo using the integrated terminal within Visual Studio Code. He specifies the name of the project and the repo URL. Once the installer has finished, he navigates to the new directory and opens the project in Visual Studio Code.

The instructor explains that he has added several packages to the project, including Auth0 for logins and registrations, font awesome, MongoDB, numeral for formatting numbers, OpenAI for generating blog posts, and Stripe for payments. He has also included Tailwind CSS, and the Tailwind configs. The final CSS build for the project is generated from the globals CSS file, which is imported within the pages and _app.js. Additionally, the instructor has included a favicon PNG in the public directory, which will be used as the Blog Standard logo. Finally, he has included the boilerplate file and code for MongoDB in the lib directory, which comes directly from the MongoDB documentation.

The instructor then runs the project to ensure it is set up correctly and moves on to discuss the first pages in the next lecture.