Is there no intention to respond? Not even to say, "no, we are no longer maintaining"? Is the only path forward someone forking the project?

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the wait, I wanted to give Tom a chance to answer before I do.

For context, here's what happened the last year and a half, from my perspective.

After Oleh announced he would stop working on MkDocs, I wanted us (MkDocs contributors, plugin authors, etc.) to build an empowered community to improve the state of the project and avoid having once again a sole maintainer that would have too much responsibility to bear alone. We started a discussion, tagged many people, most of which answered very favorably - this was going well. I really wanted to do this with all of you, especially those invested much in the project, such as Martin. I think Martin proved many times he was very capable of driving a project to success, so I was super happy to be driving the "community empowerment" effort with him and Tom. After interactions on GitHub and Twitter, Tom announced he would take the lead maintainer role again, which we all welcomed. We had one or two video calls, where Tom explained he wanted to rework MkDocs (new, more modern theme, maybe different ways for customization), but didn't seem to be very interested in maintaining or evolving the current project. This didn't align well with my (and others') view, but we were still happy to see work getting done. Tom also created a GitHub sponsors account for the MkDocs organization, working on gathering sponsorships. Tom released v1.6.1, Martin and I groomed the backlog, reducing issues by more than 50%. I started dedicating more of my time into triaging issues, answering questions, reviewing PRs, etc., which you might have noticed. I also created a small sponsorship towards MkDocs (Tom). Unfortunately, I wasn't comfortable merging PRs and publishing new releases without at least getting directions/opinions from Tom, but Tom stayed silent when I or others tagged him (here, here, here, here). A few months later, Tom stated that he didn't have time to work on the project (which is fine and understandable), and I think he was hoping to gather more sponsorships before he could dedicate time to the project (again, perfectly reasonable, one has to pay rent and feed their family). But that was kind of demotivating to me: no Tom, no effort to empower the community. I wanted this to be a collaborative effort, I didn't have the will nor time to drive it all by myself. I deleted my sponsorship to MkDocs (Tom) because it felt pointless (and I'm already sponsoring @encode 😄), and I then slowly stopped triaging issues, answering questions, etc.. So, essentially, nothing much happened since last year, and today MkDocs seems unmaintained.

On the bright side, Tom did give me admin access on the mkdocs repository (without me actually asking for it, but at least it reduces the bus factor), so if anyone trustworthy would like to step up, I can grant privileges on the repo 🙂

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a practical update.

I have forked mkdocs/mkdocs under mkdocs-ng/mkdocs and published it to PyPI as mkdocs-ng. The mkdocs CLI command remains the same; the main change is the package name.

I am also a MkDocs user myself and rely on it across several of my own projects, so I would like to help keep MkDocs maintained while leaving the door open for upstream collaboration.

If the current maintainers are willing to grant the necessary permissions, I would be happy to help maintain the upstream mkdocs/mkdocs repository directly and contribute fixes there.

Until then, I will continue maintaining the fork, mainly focusing on bug fixes, compatibility updates, dependency maintenance, preserving the existing MkDocs behavior, and building on the fixes and maintenance work already merged in the fork.

Hopefully, this gives users a practical path forward.