Our Continuation of MkDocs • Hacker News Board

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#11

Post by Tzk » Wed, May 06, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

athorax wrote: post #8

Zensical has been a solid replacement for us so far. In general everything "just works" out of the box and is way quicker to build/reload. It is still in fairly early stages, but is actively being worked on https://zensical.org/spark/proposals/zap-005-navigation-auth... I hope they are able to monetize in a way the keeps the core project open while making it a sustainable venture going forward.

+1 for zensical. If you used (mostly) vanilla „material for mkdocs“, then zensical is a great replacement. I’ve also made the switch on personal projects and zensical works great in its current state.

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#12

Post by anentropic » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

athorax wrote: post #8

Zensical has been a solid replacement for us so far. In general everything "just works" out of the box and is way quicker to build/reload. It is still in fairly early stages, but is actively being worked on https://zensical.org/spark/proposals/zap-005-navigation-auth... I hope they are able to monetize in a way the keeps the core project open while making it a sustainable venture going forward.

Yeah I wanted to migrate to it, but I immediately ran into a bunch of stuff that was not possible yet (roadmapped)

So ProperDocs looks promising in terms of being able to just migrate an existing mkdocs project across and have everything still work

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#13

Post by slipfold » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

This is probably a relevant exploration of the issues: https://fpgmaas.com/blog/collapse-of-mkdocs/

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#14

Post by kw3b » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #4

Two open source dramas in one week? Get the popcorn. From one of the links[0]: > I do not see him as qualified to keep this project maintainership and if I had the choice, would I remove him. …where “him” is Tom Christie, aka lovelydinosaur, the original author from what I can tell, and the copyright holder from the license file. I don’t know what’s going on, but if someone contributing to one of my projects, that I…

I agree here. I've actually never heard the term continuation used to describe a divergent fork. MkDocs might be unmaintained now but it's still licensed, which doesn't change or expire over maintenance issues or lack of activity. (I'm not arguing against the greater good of keeping MkDocs going, it's awesome and I've used it more than once, but a licensee doesn't have rights to "continue" MkDocs - that's up to the copyright holder, the remedy for a user is to fork under the terms of the license).

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#15

Post by kstrauser » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #4

Two open source dramas in one week? Get the popcorn. From one of the links[0]: > I do not see him as qualified to keep this project maintainership and if I had the choice, would I remove him. …where “him” is Tom Christie, aka lovelydinosaur, the original author from what I can tell, and the copyright holder from the license file. I don’t know what’s going on, but if someone contributing to one of my projects, that I…

Oops, I noticed too late to edit this, but Christie goes by a different name now. I said "Tom" because that's what the license file says. Sorry, lovelydinosaur! No disrespect intended.

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#16

Post by drcongo » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

athorax wrote: post #8

Zensical has been a solid replacement for us so far. In general everything "just works" out of the box and is way quicker to build/reload. It is still in fairly early stages, but is actively being worked on https://zensical.org/spark/proposals/zap-005-navigation-auth... I hope they are able to monetize in a way the keeps the core project open while making it a sustainable venture going forward.

I switched seamlessly to Zensical too. Quite like it so far.

Re: Our Continuation of MkDocs

#17

Post by aniceperson » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #5

This is a timely discussion for me. I've been dealing with several open source packages that aren't moving nearly as fast I need to get work done. I fork them, creating feature branches to upstream and merge them into a vendored dev branch I can use myself. But when I can push a dozen PRs a day and the maintainers barely merge a few a month, the math does not add up. I bet many AI-powered developers are facing this p…

probably most of your prs shouldn't land on mainline anyway. are they fixes? good. Feature? write a plug-in. Does it not support a plug-in? Well, you made a bad choice since the beginning. mkdocs has no parallization and brings nothing to the table compared to sphinx since its inception.