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Building a thriving ecosystem |
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December, usually a quiet month, turned out to be incredibly productive for us. We squashed nearly all open bugs – including that stubborn hanging builds issue – and rebuilt our design, development and release workflows from the ground up. This paid off: our processes are humming, and for the past two weeks, we've been back at the drawing board working on the module system. Read on to learn more. |
Highlights |
Introducing Zensical Spark |
We're thrilled to welcome Siemens and FastAPI, among others, in Zensical Spark – a collaborative space where we shape the future of Zensical together with organizations that consider documentation mission-critical. |
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Sebastián Ramírez, creator or FastAPI, in Zensical Spark
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In Zensical Spark, we create Zensical Advancement Proposals (ZAPs), giving our members early access to designs and prototypes while they're still taking shape, and before implementation work begins. Rather than simply using finished work, members can directly participate in the design process, bringing in their organization's specific requirements and expertise. Excerpts from the latest ZAPs are publicly available: |
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With this process, we ensure that Zensical evolves in a direction that meets the needs of all users and professionals, and that our work is sufficiently funded, allowing us to keep Zensical free for everyone. Whether you're part of Zensical Spark or using Zensical free forever, your feedback shapes where we go next. |
If documentation is mission-critical for your organization, we'd love to chat. We invite you to join a 30-minute call with our team for a tour of Zensical Spark! |
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Fuzzy search is here – tpyos welcmoe! |
In 0.0.15 we shipped support for fuzzy search – no configuration is necessary. If a word is not found in the index, Disco automatically tries to find similar words: |
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In other news |
- We released four new versions in December, fixing almost all known bugs.
- Occasional hanging builds on Windows and Linux were resolved.
- ZRX has seen four new versions, laying the foundation for the module system.
- We also released mono, our monorepo automation toolkit, written in Rust.
- With mono, we improved our changelog generation and release workflows.
- Zensical now has an official Docker image that is automatically built.
- The Zensical UI is now versioned separately – a first step towards theming.
- We described how we work – our design and development process.
- We've published our answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs).
- Zensical hit 2,300 stars on GitHub in just two months – thank you!
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What's next |
We've started design work on Zensical's module system – the foundation for everything we'll build in 2026 and beyond, and the backbone of the ecosystem we envision emerging around Zensical. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience with the MkDocs plugin system, we've seen firsthand what works, what doesn't, and where friction emerges in real-world use. That experience puts us in a strong position to address long-standing challenges thoughtfully and deliberately from the start. |
The module system will enable extensibility, easy customization, and open up Zensical for third-party integrations. We'll provide design documents and early previews in Zensical Spark, before we make them available for public review. |
In the meantime, cross-references in mkdocstrings – one of the most anticipated improvements – is expected to land in Zensical later this month. |
Your voice matters |
Do you have questions, suggestions, or anything else on your mind? Is there anything you would like to see in future issues of Zensical Monthly? Hit reply and let us know! |
Thank you for building with Zensical! |
