If you've built documentation in the Python ecosystem, chances are you've used Martin Donath's work. His Material for MKDocs powers docs for FastAPI, uv, AWS, OpenAI, and tens of thousands of other projects. But when MKDocs 2.0 took a direction that would break Material and 300 ecosystem plugins, Martin went back to the drawing board. The result is Zensical: A new static site generator with a Rust core, differential builds in milliseconds instead of minutes, and a migration path designed to bring the whole community along.

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Links from the show

Guest
Martin Donath: github.com

Zensical: zensical.org
Material for MkDocs: squidfunk.github.io
Getting Started: zensical.org
Github pages: docs.github.com
Cloudflare pages: pages.cloudflare.com
Michaels Example: gist.github.com
Material for MkDocs: zensical.org
gohugo.io/content-management/shortcodes: gohugo.io
a sense of size of the project: blobs.talkpython.fm
Zensical Spark: zensical.org

Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com
Episode #542 deep-dive: talkpython.fm/542
Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm

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#542: Zensical - a modern static site generator

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