General¶

Transforming Material for MkDocs

We are working on an amazing set of features which has required some behind-the-scenes work we are now ready to share in a series of posts. Here, we give an overview of our goals, features in the making, things that kept us up at night, and our commitment to Open Source.

We know it's been quite a while since our last update, which is why we're eager to share what's happening in and around Material for MkDocs with you. For the largest part of 2024, we've been focused on transforming the core of Material for MkDocs preparing the ground for new, interconnected features that are amongst the most frequently requested.

This article is the first in a series where we'll explore how we aim to support our users through improved information retrieval, provide better support for multi-lingual sites and versioning, as well as improve the overall authoring experience. We outline our vision for the projects' evolution and describe what we have been working on. In this and the coming blog posts, we will share our progress with you, and we're excited to hear your thoughts.

Adding a badge to your project

You enjoy working with Material for MkDocs? Share the love! You can now add a badge to your project's README, showing that your project is built with Material for MkDocs.

Material for MkDocs' logo was just added to Simple Icons, which is used by Shields.io to include logos in badges. We generated a badge for you, which you can add to your project's README:

Sunsetting Gitter: Towards Efficient Community Engagement

As we're starting to build a team around Material for MkDocs, we've decided to sunset and archive our Gitter channel on October 13, 2023 in favor of GitHub Discussions.

As part of our efforts to improve the processes for maintaining Material for MkDocs and for supporting the community, we have reviewed the use of different communication channels. At the moment, both Gitter and GitHub Discussions allow to ask the community for support and to discuss ideas and issues. In the past weeks, we have begun to question whether this duplication is in the best interest of our project. This post explains the rationale behind our decision.

The past, present and future

2021 was a fantastic year for this project as we shipped many new awesome features, saw significant user growth and leveraged GitHub Sponsors to make the project sustainable.

Today, together, MkDocs and Material for MkDocs are among the most popular options when it comes to choosing a static site generator and theme for your technical documentation project. Material for MkDocs ensures that your content is always perfectly presented to your audience, regardless of screen resolution or device capabilities. It has evolved to a framework for technical writing, offering many features, some of which are yet to be found in other static site generators. However, we're far from the end, as 2022 is going to bring some interesting new capabilities.