FAQ
Here are some frequently asked questions to help you along your way. Feel free to add to the FAQ here, or on social media.
You might also be interested in Silex vocabulary.
Whether you’re a maker about to create your project's website or you’re a designer making websites for customers, you will love Silex.
Your Design, Your Way! Free is not just about price. #Freedom
Silex can be used online or installed on your computer. You can use drag and drop to create a website, then click publish to push it online.
Silex integrate well with Snipcart and Paypal for example. Use the HTML box to paste the code these tools give you for the "add to cart" button.
It does offer a few basic templates, see this section to know Why is Silex so crude compared to other web page/site building tools?
A drag and drop editor, nothing more. You will need to bring in hosting, domain name, design...
Silex integrates well with Netlify and Github pages, which offer free custom domains along with quality hosting (and no ads).
You probably want to check the tutorials, guides and collaborative documentation https://github.com/silexlabs/Silex/wiki
We are passionate project contributors and designers who use Silex for personal and professional projects. Silex Labs uses Silex to teach web design to beginners. We work together as a community to develop our tool our way.
There are no hidden costs, no need to monetize developers or their website's users. No decisions are driven by business interests. Because Silex is open-source, no one will prevent you from adding features or doing business with Silex tools.
Why do you need my Dropbox or an FTP username and password? How will I know that my information will be kept safe?
On your first attempt to save a web page you will be asked to provide either your Dropbox or FTP user name and password.
In the case of Dropbox, we do not gain access to your Dropbox credentials. We use the OAuth mechanism they provide, giving you a path to log-in at dropbox.com.
In the case of FTP, we keep your data in a session cookie which lasts one week. After the week ends, it is deleted. FTP access requires us to save your log-in information in a session cookie; you have to trust Silex Labs (we are a non-profit organization well known in France by open source contributors).
Remember Silex is open-source, so you can host it yourself and keep your data to yourself. See the readme for more information about hosting an instance.
Mobile friendly means that your websites will look good on any device, and will be presented to Google bots as they expect it.
Responsive is a technical term meaning that the website elements size changes with the size of the windows. In the case of Silex this is not completely true: Silex has 2 states (breakpoints), which are "mobile" and "desktop". The websites scale as a whole when the window width is too small, not every element resizes independently. This keeps Silex sites always pixel perfect. See how Silex websites are scaled here
Why am I directed to GitHub when I select the help menu? I want to ask a question, but I don't want to have to log into GitHub.
If you don't want to ask a question on GitHub, you can ask on Twitter or Facebook or even email us at contact[at]silexlabs[dot]org.
Never! We don't have your data anyway, it is stored in your account (ftp, github, dropbox, owncloud...) and served by your hosting company or server. The websites created with silex do not send or receive any data from us, it is easy to make sure it does not as you have all the files and you can host them anywhere.
Silex is developed by its users. We are a team of volunteers, giving our time and energy freely, so the Silex Website Builder has fewer features than commercial web development tools. In addition to its price (FREE), and its customizability, Silex allows you to roll up your sleeves, and start to learn web design standards and understand code.
No matter what your background is, you can give back and help Silex.
If you're feeling technical, here is a great video on how to contribute to an open source project with GitHub.
First of all, congratulations, you made a website! Now go celebrate by reading the article on how to publish your website.
You can open a GitHub issue here.
If you're interested in contributing your time to make Silex a more robust product, we'd love to have your help.
I saved my website with silex editor on github. I get a unique .html file. (It looks like "editable.html" files in templates.) How can I get the full website to host it?
You need to publish your website and make it available online as described here
Silex HTML "editable" files contain all your pages and the elements and components
When I add a new page it clones the existing one so each change I make on one page persist in the other. How can I design a new page with a different style?
The idea is to use the Visible on property of elements to control which is on every page and which is only on 1 or some pages.
There is documentation about this here: Silex UI, "pages and links" section
I don't like the color picker for text color and background color
it is up to your operating system and browser, e.g. on firefox linux I have 
On windows 10 apparently it is not as good:
But @ceubri found a way to change it: https://github.com/silexlabs/Silex/issues/950
This is an error which ocures when you try to open a published website for edition. After publishing a website Silex can not edit the generated files, only the original file created with Silex.
Sections are useful to have things centered in the website and always visible whaterver size your window. See the FAQ about sections
It is possible to use only the client part of web editor and integrate the other functions into my own code (e.g. Symfony/php project)?
Silex is made to interact with other applications through these ways:
- Hosting provider
- Cloud services - Developers can add a custom cloud service to host the users files, which make Silex behave like a classic website builder - no login to third party service. Please read this doc for more info
- Components or the HTML box which lets you embed any HTML/JS/CSS code
- Add features to the front end and back end thanks to Silex APIs