mkdocs-material/docs/blog/posts/the-past-present-and-future.md

---
date: 2021-12-27
authors: [squidfunk]
description: >
  2021 was a fantastic year for this project as we shipped many new awesome
  features and made this project sustainable
categories:
  - General
---

# The past, present and future

__2021 was a fantastic year for this project as we shipped many new awesome
features, saw significant user growth and leveraged GitHub Sponsors to make the
project sustainable.__

Today, together, [MkDocs] and Material for MkDocs are among the most popular
options when it comes to choosing a static site generator and theme for your
technical documentation project. Material for MkDocs ensures that your
content is always perfectly presented to your audience, regardless of screen
resolution or device capabilities. It has evolved to a framework for technical
writing, offering many features, some of which are yet to be found in other
static site generators. However, we're far from the end, as 2022 is going to
bring some interesting new capabilities.

<!-- more -->

_This article showcases all features that were added in 2021 and gives an
outlook on what's going to drop in 2022. Additionally, it provides some context
on the history of the project._

  [MkDocs]: https://www.mkdocs.org

## A little history

In 2015, albeit 10 years in the industry, I was still quite new in Open Source.
I wanted to release my latest Open Source project [protobluff], a zero-copy
Protocol Buffers implementation for C, which I've created as part of my former
startup. As the project has a significant degree of complexity, I quickly
realized that I was in need of good user documentation.

After evaluating static site generators in general and Hugo, Sphinx and MkDocs
in particular, I quickly decided that MkDocs seemed a good choice, as it was
specifically aimed at technical project documentation and easy to use.
Unfortunately, all of the available themes looked dated and given that I'm a
very visual person, I just couldn't convince myself to call it a day.

I _had_ to build a theme.

Months later, in February 2016, I released [the first version] of Material for
MkDocs (and with it, [protobluff], the project I wanted to release in the first
place), and it looked like this:

![Material for MkDocs 0.1.0][Material for MkDocs 0.1.0]

It was already fully responsive and overall, well, quite okayish, but barely
customizable, as only the logo could be changed. Beyond that, it had no options:
No color or navigation options, no instant loading, etc. The search was very
rudimentary and only supported section titles:

![Material for MkDocs 0.1.0 Search][Material for MkDocs 0.1.0 Search]

It's important to know that at this point in time I've built Material for
MkDocs for [protobluff], the project I was really caring about. Almost 6 years
later, nobody knows protobluff, but this little side project has taken off. If
back in those days, you would've told me big organizations like AWS,
Microsoft and CERN, as well as extremely popular Open Source projects like
FastAPI and Kubernetes will be using this project in the future – I would've
declared you insane.

I still find the success of this project quite surprising, as I thought that
themes exist in abundance and are very much a solved problem. There's no glory
in themes, no stars to earn (remember that I was new in Open Source, so this was
the metric I was optimizing for), as there are thousands and thousands of
options. However, as the years progressed, I learned that _execution matters_:
although Material for MkDocs solves a problem for which thousands of solutions
exist, it excels in a specific niche, and that niche is to be known as
_technical project documentation_.

Today, this project is not only popular but funded by almost 300 individuals
and organizations, resulting in a yearly budget of more than $50,000. This
allows me to set aside enough time for the development of new features,
bug fixing, stability improvement, issue triage and general support and still
feels like a dream to me, as there are many failed stories of Open Source
funding and people telling you: _don't do Open Source, you'll be working for
free._

Making Open Source sustainable is, after all, possible in 2021.

  [the first version]: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/releases/tag/0.1.0
  [Material for MkDocs 0.1.0]: the-past-present-and-future/mkdocs-material-0.1.0.png
  [Material for MkDocs 0.1.0 Search]: the-past-present-and-future/mkdocs-material-0.1.0-search.png
  [protobluff]: https://github.com/squidfunk/protobluff

## 2021 in numbers

2021 was an exciting year, as the project has seen significant growth.

__166k people__ visited the official documentation in 2021, totalling in __1,6m
page views__ which is an increase of 83% when compared to 2020. The average
visitor spends __1,5min__ on the site. While mobile phones make up 12% of
visits, tablets only account for 0.6%. Visitors come from as many as __213
countries__, which covers almost the whole world.

### Features

It's absolutely mind-blowing that __38 new features__ were added to Material
for MkDocs throughout 2021 – __that's a new feature every 9,6 days__ –
which was only possible because of the constantly improving funding situation.
Following is a list of all features shipped in alphabetical order, some of which
are still exclusively available to sponsors as part of [Insiders]:

<div class="mdx-columns" markdown>

- [Admonition inline blocks]
- [Advanced search highlighting]
- [Anchor tracking]
- [Back-to-top button]
- [Boosting pages in search]
- [Brand new search plugin]
- [Code annotations]
- [Code annotations: anchor links]
- [Code annotations: strip comments]
- [Code block titles]
- [Code block line anchors]
- [Color palette toggle]
- [Content tabs: improved support]
- [Content tabs: auto-linking]
- Content tabs: animated indicator
- [Cookie consent]
- [Custom admonition icons]
- [Dark mode support for images]
- [Dismissable announcement bar]
- [Excluding content from search]
- Latest release tag
- [Mermaid.js integration]
- [Navigation icons]
- [Remove generator notice]
- [Rich search previews]
- Stay on page when switching versions
- [Search highlighting]
- [Search sharing]
- [Search suggestions]
- [Section index pages]
- [Site language selection]
- [Social cards]
- [Sticky navigation tabs]
- [Tags with search integration]
- [Tokenizer with lookahead]
- [Versioning]
- [Version warning]
- [Was this page helpful?]

</div>

Additionally, a lot of bugs were fixed in the __1,000 commits__ that were pushed
to the repository this year. The [changelog] includes a list of all fixes.
Furthermore, a large amount of time was invested into refactoring the code base
to keep it in good shape. While the `mkdocs-material` package was released
__55__ times, `mkdocs-material-insiders` was shipped __72__ times.

  [Insiders]: ../../insiders/index.md
  [Admonition inline blocks]: ../../reference/admonitions.md#inline-blocks
  [Advanced search highlighting]: search-better-faster-smaller.md#accurate-highlighting
  [Anchor tracking]: ../../setup/setting-up-navigation.md#anchor-tracking
  [Back-to-top button]: ../../setup/setting-up-navigation.md#back-to-top-button
  [Boosting pages in search]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-search.md#search-boosting
  [Brand new search plugin]: search-better-faster-smaller.md
  [Code annotations]: ../../reference/code-blocks.md#adding-annotations
  [Code annotations: anchor links]: ../../reference/code-blocks.md#anchor-links
  [Code annotations: strip comments]: ../../reference/code-blocks.md#stripping-comments
  [Code block titles]: ../../reference/code-blocks.md#adding-a-title
  [Code block line anchors]: ../../setup/extensions/python-markdown-extensions.md#anchor-linenums
  [Color palette toggle]: ../../setup/changing-the-colors.md#color-palette-toggle
  [Content tabs: improved support]: ../../reference/content-tabs.md
  [Content tabs: auto-linking]: ../../reference/content-tabs.md#linked-content-tabs
  [Cookie consent]: ../../setup/ensuring-data-privacy.md#cookie-consent
  [Custom admonition icons]: ../../reference/admonitions.md#admonition-icons
  [Dark mode support for images]: ../../reference/images.md#light-and-dark-mode
  [Dismissable announcement bar]: ../../setup/setting-up-the-header.md#mark-as-read
  [Excluding content from search]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-search.md#search-exclusion
  [Mermaid.js integration]: ../../reference/diagrams.md
  [Navigation icons]: ../../reference/index.md#setting-the-page-icon
  [Remove generator notice]: ../../setup/setting-up-the-footer.md#generator-notice
  [Rich search previews]: search-better-faster-smaller.md#rich-search-previews
  [Search highlighting]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-search.md#search-highlighting
  [Search sharing]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-search.md#search-sharing
  [Search suggestions]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-search.md#search-suggestions
  [Section index pages]: ../../setup/setting-up-navigation.md#section-index-pages
  [Site language selection]: ../../setup/changing-the-language.md#site-language-selector
  [Social cards]: ../../setup/setting-up-social-cards.md
  [Sticky navigation tabs]: ../../setup/setting-up-navigation.md#sticky-navigation-tabs
  [Tags with search integration]: ../../setup/setting-up-tags.md
  [Tokenizer with lookahead]: search-better-faster-smaller.md#tokenizer-lookahead
  [Versioning]: ../../setup/setting-up-versioning.md#versioning
  [Version warning]: ../../setup/setting-up-versioning.md#version-warning
  [Was this page helpful?]: ../../setup/setting-up-site-analytics.md#was-this-page-helpful
  [changelog]: ../../changelog/index.md

### Funding

In 2021, monthly funding increased from $1,050 in the beginning of January to
more than $4,300 (Dec 27, 2021), totaling in a yearly budget of more than
$50,000. Compared to last year, __revenue from funding has increased by 617%__
– which is absolutely unbelievable:

![Funding]

  [Funding]: the-past-present-and-future/funding.png

I'm solely providing these numbers to fulfill the transparency pledge I'm giving
to my [awesome sponsors], and to show that it's possible to make existing Open
Source projects sustainable by following a well-designed release strategy.

You can learn about the strategy in the [Insiders] guide.

  [awesome sponsors]: ../../insiders/index.md#how-to-become-a-sponsor

## 2022

Standing at the verge of the next year, it's safe to say that the project will
continue to prosper and evolve, yielding many awesome features that will make
technical writing more comfortable and flexible. Here's an excerpt of the
features that will see the light of day in 2022:

- __Instant previews__: [instant previews] will render a specific page section
  inside a tooltip when hovering an internal link, which will allow to implement
  things like glossaries. Further support for improving glossary functionality
  will also be investigated.

- __Text annotations__: as a logical progression of [code annotations] which
  were added in 2021, authors will be able to add annotations to plain text,
  yielding excellent opportunities for side content. Of course, text annotations
  will be as easy to use as code annotations.

- __Navigation pruning__: to optimize large documentation projects, Material
  for MkDocs will introduce a new feature flag called `navigation.prune` that
  will lead to significantly smaller HTML files for documentation projects with
  huge navigation hierarchies.

- __Navigation status badge__: as an addition to the recently added
  [navigation icon][Navigation icons] support, a status will be attributable to
  each page, allowing to mark a page in the navigation tree with an icon as
  :material-alert-decagram: __new__ or :material-trash-can: __deprecated__.
  Custom status types will also be supported.

- __Card grids__: as a further component in the toolkit of technical writing,
  [card grids] will allow arranging content in grids, which is especially
  useful for overview pages. They will allow to arrange arbitrary content,
  including code blocks, admonitions, etc.

- __Blog support__: blogging support is still [under investigation] and expected
  to be one of the major additions in 2022. Blogging will perfectly integrate
  with writing documentation, allowing to use all components available in
  Material for MkDocs.

This list is incomplete. Additionally, many new smaller features will be added
next year, just as in 2021. You can follow [@squidfunk on Twitter] to stay
updated.

__Happy new year!__ :tada:

  [Instant previews]: https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1466794654213492743
  [card grids]: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/issues/3018
  [under investigation]: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/issues/3353
  [@squidfunk on Twitter]: https://twitter.com/squidfunk