mkdocs-material VS mkdocstrings

Material Mk-Docs by Martin Donath works well if you prefer python.

https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

I'm an 'outsider', but from from the outside the Material For MkDocs Project looks like a very well managed open source project.

Martin Donath's project uses a 'sponsorware' release strategy to generate donations.

From my vantage point it seems to be working pretty well.

I just recently went through this decision process. My aim is to write code and math oriented posts so I need good support for nice syntax highlighting (at least colored) and mathjax (preferable) or katex. Substack is the most popular newsletter platform but fails at these two criteria. I love how math and syntax highlighting (plus numerous other features) work in MkDocs Material, which recently added a Blog plugin.

I wanted to combine the best of both: Substack as an amazing email social network, and MkDocs Material’s awesome look. So I’ve gone with using Substack as the core platform which I use to manage subscribers, and use it to post either math/code-free posts or a short teasers pointing to my main blog site on MkDocs Material when I need to show math/code

https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

I've been migrating content to MKDocs (Material) over the last few months, so feel fairly qualified on this subject. It's somewhat limited in terms of navigation, but can probably handle 400-500 pages; you can see how navigation works in the link. Otherwise, it can handle most, if not all, the tasks you've listed.

Mkdocs has the mkdocstrings plugin, offering limited automated API documentation capabilities. It is however nowhere near as capable as Sphinx' autodoc, missing granularity in its configuration, limited intersphinx-like cross-referencing support, and essential features like documentation of inherited members, or the ability to manually describe objects if needed.

mkdocstrings works well, although it is not as powerful as the API documentation in Sphinx.

Author of Materia for MkDocs here. MkDocstrings [1] implements automatic generation of reference documentation from sources. It's language-agnostic, actively maintained and currently supports Python [2] and Crystal [3]. It also integrates nicely with Material for MkDocs.

[1]: https://mkdocstrings.github.io/

Some time has passed since I first introduced mkdocstrings here on reddit. If you don't know what mkdocstrings is: it's the equivalent of the autodoc Sphinx extension, but for MkDocs, a Markdown static site generator. It works differently though, and supports multiple languages by design (not only Python). Someone actually wrote a very good handler for the Crystal language, and another user on GitHub recently expressed their interest for writing one for Go.

Write proper docstrings as you go along (every time you write a new class/method/function you can document what it’s doing as you’ll know why and what from the pattern you chose). Using a tool like mkdocstrings makes maintaining documentation for larger projects automatic.

I learned of https://github.com/pawamoy/mkdocstrings recently. Is it similar ?

A user of mkdocstrings wrote a Crystal handler for their own use-case. They asked on the Gitter channel if we could allow to load external handlers, so they don't have to fork the project and install the fork, but rather just install their lightweight package containing just the handler.