2025¶

Goodbye, GitHub Discussions

With the launch of Zensical, we're evolving how we work together with the community to ensure long-term sustainability and professional support, fostering meaningful collaboration.

The launch of Zensical two weeks ago marked a significant milestone, as it establishes a new foundation for our mission to build scalable Open Source systems for technical writing. Additionally, we're adopting a structured, transparent, and community-driven approach to guide the evolution of our projects – prioritizing what to build, and shaping Zensical's future together.

Our new approach distills a decade of experience maintaining Material for MkDocs, allowing us to professionalize and scale our efforts from a small team to a fully organized operation, while keeping the software free and open to everyone.

As Material for MkDocs has entered maintenance mode, our discussion board is now read-only.

In this article, we reflect on the challenges we've navigated, the lessons we've learned, as these experiences have shaped our approach to community management and support that we're building with Zensical.

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Material for MkDocs Insiders – Now free for everyone

9.7.0, the final version of Material for MkDocs, includes all features that were previously exclusive to sponsors, making Material for MkDocs Insiders available to everyone!

As we're shifting our efforts to Zensical, Material for MkDocs is entering maintenance mode. This means that while we'll continue to fix critical bugs and security issues for 12 month at least, no new features will be added to Material for MkDocs.

We're also discontinuing our sponsorware model, saying goodbye to GitHub Sponsors. If you were a sponsor of our work, you already received an email mentioning that your sponsorship was cancelled. As one of the numerous individuals and organizations sponsoring Material for MkDocs over the past years – thank you! Your continued support has been invaluable.

Now, we want everyone to benefit from all features we have developed for Material for MkDocs, which is why we're making all Insiders features available to everyone!

This is the logical next step in our journey as we focus on Zensical – our next-generation static site generator built from the ground up to overcome MkDocs' technical limitations. Zensical is fully Open Source, licensed under MIT, maintains compatibility with Material for MkDocs, and can build your existing projects with minimal changes.

In the coming months, we'll close the feature parity gap, bringing the expressiveness of Material for MkDocs to Zensical.

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Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the Material for MkDocs team

We are thrilled to announce Zensical, our next-gen static site generator designed to simplify the process of building documentation sites. Distilled from a decade of experience, Zensical is our effort to overcome the technical limitations of MkDocs, reaching far beyond its capabilities.

Zensical is the result of thousands of hours of work – built from the ground up for a modern and comfortable authoring experience, while making it easy for developers to extend and customize Zensical through its upcoming module system. Our goal is to support docs-as-code workflows with tens of thousands of pages, without compromising performance or usability.

To make the transition seamless, compatibility comes first. We're putting significant effort into ensuring a smooth migration from Material for MkDocs for all users. Zensical can natively read mkdocs.yml, allowing you to build your existing project with minimal changes. As of now, a subset of plugins is supported, and we're working on feature parity in the coming months.

Zensical is fully Open Source, licensed under MIT, and can be used for any purpose, including for commercial use. We're also saying goodbye to our sponsorware model, replacing it with our new offering for professional users: Zensical Spark. This allows us to stay independent, maximizing user value, as we shape the future of Zensical together with you.

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