4/4 Maintaining Material for MkDocs for almost 10 years taught us many valuable lessons – knowledge that directly influences the development of Zensical.

We're very excited about the future and are happy for everyone that builds it together with us!

3/4 We're very excited that @pawamoy.bsky.social, the maintainer of MkDocs, joined Zensical! He also put an end to his sponsorware model and from now one we join forces to bring the best-in class API reference docs functionality to Zensical, and go far beyond that.

pawamoy.github.io/posts/sunset...

2/4 Last week we released @zensical.org, a modern static site generator, rethinking static site generator from the ground up. With Zensical out, we also said goodbye to GitHub Sponsors and the sponsorware model, moving all features to the community edition.

bsky.app/profile/squi...

Great article! Very on point 😃

THANK YOU to every sponsor who supported us over the years. Your contributions made it possible to build Material for MkDocs into what it is today and gave us the foundation to create Zensical. We're deeply grateful for your trust and support throughout this journey.

A component system is one of the top priorities on our roadmap – we already have a working prototype and will transition it to production-ready in the coming months ☺️

zensical.org/about/roadma...

Thanks for supporting Material for MkDocs for such a long time! Without our sponsors, Zensical wouldn't exist. And thanks for your interest in Zensical – we'll be able to do so much more than with MkDocs 🚀

7/7 Learn more about the road ahead, our vision for Zensical, our roadmap, how we make the project sustainable, and our new offering for professionals: Zensical Spark.

Read the full announcement on our blog:
squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-mater...

6/7 Why now? MkDocs is unmaintained since August 2024 – with no releases in over a year, accumulating issues and PRs – a supply chain risks for us and all of our users.

5/7 Maximum compatibility – Zensical natively reads mkdocs.yml files. Your existing Material for MkDocs projects work with minimal changes – Markdown files, templates, CSS/JS extensions can stay the same.

We'll reach feature parity within the next months:
zensical.org/compatibility/

4/7 Disco, our blazing-fast client-side search engine we've built from scratch, with better ranking and filtering capabilities:

– Lightweight
– Rich-text support
– Filters and aggregations
– Search in paths

We'll also release Disco as a standalone OSS project in 2026.

3/7 ZRX, our new differential build engine, makes repeated builds 4-5x faster:

– $ zensical serve – start writing immediately
– Fix typos in seconds, not minutes

We're just getting started: moving Python Markdown to a Rust-based parser in 2026 – unlocking its full potential.

2/7 Our fresh, modern design breaks free from the Material design aesthetic:

– New look, same structure = trivial to switch
– New mobile sidebar

Want to keep the Material Design look? No problem – it's just a single line of configuration.

Da muss ich Peter zitieren: Clever ist manchmal das Gegenteil von intelligent @sirpepe.bsky.social – das hab ich immer im Kopf, wenn ich mal wieder was verkacke 😅

CommonJS? Hey dude that sounds cool, I'm gonna check it out!

IMHO: Every line of code is a liability, your own included 😉

The Vietnamese restaurant? What a bummer!