Silex website builder
Silex is a free website builder, that can be used directly in your browser. The skills needed to edit a website depend on what needs to be done : use the drag and drop / WYSIWYG interface to intuitively edit a website, or the integrated CSS and Javascript editors to add styles and interactivity to the elements.
Silex is a free and open-source alternative to proprietary website builders like Wix.com, Weebly, Jimdo or Squarespace.
History
- Founded in 2003 by Alex Hoyau, Pol Goasdoué and Pierre Teissière. The project is oriented towards video and cross media.
- In 2005, the version v0-6 is presented at the WWDC2005 in Cupertino California. Apple is interested in Flash capacity to compete with their QuickTime plug-in. Macromedia has just been acquired by Adobe, Apple’s main partner.
- In 2006, the program was presented in several conferences at La Villette and won a challenge organized by Dauphine high school with INRIA - French National institute for research in computer science and control. The program at this time was mainly used for freelancers small projects.
- In 2007, Silex source code officially released as open source
- In 2008, Silex was among the 100 first Open Source projects on SourceForge. Silex v1 is released.
- In 2009, Silex was project of the month on SourceForge. The program was presented Silex at several French conference: Futur en Seine, Les Trophées du Libre, Pas sage en Seine, Wikiplaza
- In 2010, the team members formalized their cooperation by creating a non profit organization for promotion, deployment support, and development of open source software projects related to Silex and Open Source Flash. The organization became the official maintainer of AMFPHP, a mature communautary project.
- In 2012, Silex has reached the 100.000 downloads. And the team has made a dedicated version for HTML, the html5 editor, which was downloaded 1000 times on the first month.
- In 2013, the team, led by Alex Hoyau started from scratch and build Silex V2 with Javascript, nodejs and more modern technologies than the previous version.
- In 2016, Silex Labs foundation has set up a crowd funding campaign to give Silex international concern by creating a multilingual documentation and tutorials, and to create free templates to facilitate the creation of a website, and to develop a "responsive editor" to make it possible to optimize the mobile version of websites.
Features
- WYSIWYG environment to edit a publication with drag and drop
- HTML, CSS and javascript code editors included
- suitable for prototyping
- web based, can be installed locally, on a web server or as a portable app
- free templates and plugins
| Free | Own your data | Type of websites | WYSIWYG / Drag'n drop | Use of CSS/JS/HTML | Widgets and templates | Self hosted / downloadable | Static web page | Technical skills required | Time to learn the basics | |
| Silex | Showcase / small websites | ** | 1h | |||||||
| WordPress | Any type and size | *** | 4h | |||||||
| Wix | Showcase / small websites | * | 1h | |||||||
| Jekyll | Any type and size | **** | 4h |