Stastic Designer is a drag-and-drop universal template editor built on the Silex open source website builder, designed to let users visually create layouts and publish them to static site generators like Jekyll and 11ty. It is a work-in-progress tool that has since been replaced by Silex v3, which users should adopt instead.
What is Stastic Designer?
Stastic Designer is a drag-and-drop template editor that turns Silex web pages into layouts for static site generators. It takes a website created in Silex with one page per page type, lets you mark elements as templates, and publishes the result to a local or GitHub-hosted Jekyll or 11ty folder. The project is maintained by the Silex Labs community, and the repository acknowledges that it has been replaced by Silex v3 with a link to v3.silex.me.
Key Features
- Desktop app — Run Stastic Designer locally and offline via the desktop installation, following Silex Desktop setup instructions.
- Online mode — Use the hosted instance at design.stastic.net without installing anything.
- Template panel — Write HTML plus Liquid syntax in the designated panel and it is inserted at publication time, while still displaying the element in Silex and preview mode.
- Publication for 11ty and Jekyll — Each Silex page becomes a layout; files are stored in the proper folders and formats for css, js, html, and assets.
- Website-specific components — Load components in the "+" menu that are stored with the website itself.
- Convert to component — Convert a selected element into a reusable component with a dedicated tool.
- Included adapters — Adapters for 11ty, Jekyll, Forestry, and Salesforce Pardot.
Who is it for?
- Static site developers who already use Jekyll or 11ty and want a visual way to build page layouts without hand-coding every template.
- Designers who prefer drag-and-drop editing over writing Liquid or HTML templates directly.
- Developers building component libraries who want to store reusable components alongside their site and load them from a components folder.
What can you do with Stastic Designer?
- Jekyll users: Build a site in Silex with a page per template type, then publish into a Jekyll project folder on GitHub or your local machine.
- 11ty users: Do the same for Eleventy, with each Silex page becoming a layout file.
- Salesforce Pardot users: Use the Pardot adapter to produce structured templates that match Pardot's requirements.
- Component authors: Convert any selected element into a component and reuse it across pages.
How does it work?
The workflow described in the documentation is: create a website in Silex with one page for each page type in the final website; select elements that should come from the CMS and make them "templates"; then publish the website to a folder containing a Jekyll or 11ty website, either on GitHub or locally. For local development, enable the fs service and run the build commands shown in the repo.
Current status
The repository's own header states that this tool has been replaced by Silex v3. Development focus has moved to the new version, and new users are directed to v3.silex.me and the Silex v3 kickoff article. The Stastic Designer documentation remains incomplete, so relying on it for production work is not advised.
