mkdocs-material enters maintenance mode

[2bndy5]

It seems mkdocs has been less maintained for the last year¹. Also the material-mkdocs theme has entered maintenance mode². I think this may mark be the end of an era.

Material-mkdocs devs have created a solution called zensical which should be a drop-in replacement for mkdocs. Unfortunately, zensical isn't completely ready:

1. It does not have support for themes. The default theme (used on zensical site) is bland and not customizable enough to show distinction between different projects.
2. It is written in a combination of rust and python, and I think the motivation is to migrate completely to rust. It currently still uses an unmaintained Python dependency (mergedeep).
3. There is already a pay wall setup for certain features (planned or implemented). Like material-mkdocs insiders approach.

Needless to say, I looked at zensical, and I was not impressed.

Honestly, If we were to switch doc site generators, I'd prefer sphinx-immaterial or mdbook.

Footnotes

1. git diff since mkdocs latest (v1.6.1) release ↩

2. See blog entry ↩

[shenxianpeng]

Thanks, hands up 🙌 — Material for MkDocs is still great in my view. I even moved back to it from Sphinx-Immaterial recently. I’d prefer not to invest additional effort right now and would rather keep using it. I’m open to trying other options when creating a project outside the cpp-linter org.

[2bndy5]

I think the deciding factor will be the status of mkdocs itself. If they can't find a responsible project leader, then mkdocs may not be as usable in the future.