As of November 5th, 2025, Material for MkDocs is now in maintenance mode, with committed support for the next 12 months. At the same time a new static site generator (SSG) has been brought to live, with a faster build engine and maximum compatibility with MkDocs (for now), and built with the same open source principle in mind: Zensical
When the SFML website was due for a simplified way to maintain it and provide better mobile support, I’ve picked Material for MkDocs as foundation, due to its ease of use (and partially because I didn’t want to work with Node.js tooling). It comes with many great built-in features, has very good defaults, works with Markdown, and has many configuration options. Plus, it’s open source and was well supported via GitHub Sponsors, which provided subscribed users early access to new features.
I’ve known for a while, that Martin Donath has been working on a new and faster build system. What has come as news to me, is that the whole Material for MkDocs project is now being shutdown, in favor of a completely new project and setup. You can read more about it in their blog post.
Since its initial release in 2016, Material for MkDocs has helped tens of thousands of teams to publish and maintain reliable documentation. However, in recent years, it has become apparent that we were running up against limitations of our core dependency, MkDocs. These limitations proved impossible to overcome as they are deeply rooted in its architecture.
While I can’t judge the technical aspects, I do believe the move to a new, separate project makes sense. Material for MkDocs started as a MkDocs theme through a side project and grew into a small company. Next to having the foundation, MkDocs, holding back further development, the use of “Material” in the name also limits the design possibilities, and finally, the managing of subscribers through GitHub Sponsors at their given scale has not been easy, as Martin explained in a podcast episode.
I’ll certainly give it a try, given that we likely have to migrate the SFML website anyways and see how their claims to “5x faster rebuilds”, “Modern design”, and “Blazing-fast search” hold up. What I’m most curious about is, how this switch works out on the commercial side. Martin has closed the Material for MkDocs GitHub Sponsors account, leaving behind $16k in monthly sponsorships – how many of those will switch over to Zensical?