Salient WPBakery Page Builder

The Salient WPBakery Page Builder is the drag and drop editor every Salient page is built with. Underneath it is WPBakery Page Builder, the commercial builder used on millions of WordPress sites, in a build that ThemeNectar rebuilds for the theme on every release. It is bundled with Salient, and it needs no separate purchase and no license key.

It is not a skin over the stock plugin. Salient Core registers 84 elements of its own, removes 52 stock WPBakery elements it replaces, rebuilds the Row and Column panels around the theme's own controls, and swaps WPBakery's template library for Salient Studio. That is what makes it the most heavily tailored WPBakery build shipped with any theme.

What the Salient build changes

	Stock WPBakery	Salient WPBakery Page Builder
Elements	The standard set	84 Salient elements alongside it, and 52 stock ones removed where Salient has its own
Row settings	Layout, background, a design tab	Row type, full height, shape dividers, mouse parallax, animated gradients, sticky rows, color change sections. See Rows
Column settings	Width, background, a design tab	Per-device width and offset, sticky columns, backdrop filter, box shadow, column links, scroll animations. See Columns
Templates	WPBakery Template Library	Salient Studio, a library of designed sections
License	Bought separately	Bundled with Salient, no key to enter
Updates	From WPBakery	Reviewed, rebuilt with the theme's fixes, shipped in the next Salient release

The detail

• 84 elements that ship only with Salient. Carousel, Flip Box, Fancy Box, Content Trail, Chat Thread, Cascading Images, Morphing Outline and the rest are ThemeNectar's own, built for this theme rather than inherited. Each has a page under Elements.
• 52 stock elements removed. Where a WPBakery element overlaps a Salient one, Salient unregisters it, so the Add Element window never offers the same thing twice. Tabs, accordions, carousels, image galleries, post grids, buttons, the WordPress widget wrappers: all replaced. If you are migrating a site and want the originals back, see Enable Native WPBakery Elements.
• A lighter front end as a result. The vendor libraries the stock elements pull in, Isotope, Lightbox2 and Animate.css, load only when one of those elements is on the page. Because Salient unregisters them in favor of its own, a normal Salient page never downloads any of the three.
• Row and Column panels built for the theme. The theme's controls sit in the element's own tabs rather than in a separate options box bolted alongside. See Rows and Columns.
• Salient Studio in place of the template library. WPBakery's own Template Library is unregistered; Salient Studio takes its slot with designed sections that drop in as ordinary rows and columns.
• An interface restyled to match. The editor, its panels and its controls are themed rather than left in WPBakery's default chrome.
• Fixes carried forward. Each WPBakery release is reviewed and rebuilt with the theme's compatibility and hardening changes on top, rather than shipped through untouched.

Which WPBakery version ships

Salient 18.3.0 bundles WPBakery Page Builder 8.7.3.

You do not update it yourself, and you should not install WPBakery separately. Each WPBakery release is reviewed, rebuilt with the theme's changes on top, and shipped in the next Salient update, so the version you have is always the one the theme has been tested against. A new WPBakery version can therefore take a little while to reach you. The plugin may show a notice asking you to activate it or enter a purchase code: you do not have one and do not need one, and nothing is locked behind it. See Salient WPBakery Page Builder for the licensing detail.

The interface

Hover a hotspot to see what each part of the editor does.

1. 1The three buttons above the builder switch editing mode: Classic Mode returns to the plain WordPress editor, Frontend Editor edits the page on top of the live layout, and Gutenberg Editor switches to the block editor
2. 2Adding content: + opens the list of every element you can insert, Salient Templates opens the Salient Studio library of predesigned sections, and My Templates holds layouts you have saved yourself. The large + at the bottom of the page does the same as the first button
3. 3Undo and redo step back and forward through every change made in the builder. Beside them, the arrows switch to a full screen editing view and the gear opens the settings that apply to this page alone
4. 4Column controls: the plus icon adds elements to the column, the pencil opens the column's settings, and the trash icon deletes it
5. 5Row controls: the pencil opens the row's settings, the next icon clones the row, and the trash icon deletes it
6. 6Element controls: the pencil opens the element's settings, the next icon clones it, and the trash icon deletes it

How a page is put together

A page is rows, each row holds columns, and each column holds elements. Almost all the styling lives on the row and the column rather than on the elements inside them.

• Rows are the horizontal bands. A row sets its own width, height, background, spacing and scroll effects.
• Columns divide a row into slots, and carry their own padding, background, shadow, animation and per-device width.
• Elements are what you drop into a column. There is a page for each one.
• Salient Studio inserts a designed section, which you then edit as ordinary rows and columns.
• Mask and Positioning are shared tabs rather than elements of their own: they appear on the elements that support them, and work the same way on each.

Raw HTML and Raw JS

Two elements let you drop code straight into a page instead of assembling it from elements: Raw HTML takes markup, and Raw JS takes a script.

Three things about them catch people out:

• The content is stored base64 encoded. Switch a page holding a Raw HTML element to Classic Mode and the shortcode reads as a block of gibberish rather than your markup. That is expected, and it is what stops the WordPress editor from reformatting your code. The builder decodes it when the page renders.
• Shortcodes inside it still run, but wpautop does not. Your line breaks and blank lines survive exactly as typed, with no stray paragraph or line break tags added around them, while any shortcode you paste in is still executed.
• Only Raw HTML has Design Options. Raw JS shares the same output template but has no design tab, so if it needs spacing, give it a class and style it from Custom CSS Code.

Developers can alter the decoded markup before it prints with the vc_raw_html_module_content filter.

Not seeing the page builder?

Check that the Salient WPBakery Page Builder plugin is installed and activated, under Appearance > Install Plugins. See installing plugins.

Video walkthrough