I resisted trying it for the longest time because I didn't want a JavaScript based tool, but I am glad I caved. It's so easy to get started, crazy fast, and the sites are absolutely beautiful out of the box yet easy to customize. The mdx support is awesome too.
I can understand the desire to want something not written in JavaScript, and I certainly have my own language prejudices, but when I surveyed static site generators, language choice was all over the map. Like, I was willing to wrangle Ruby installations and gems to get Jekyll working, something I have nearly no experience with.
From my personal experience mkdocs+mkdocs-material is like GNU+Linux.
I've trying also bookstack and even it's more "wiki" like it's great too for less tech-savvy people (I usually edit my mkdocs projects in vscode and keet them in git repos and bookstack is all web based).
Thanks! My main goal when building BookStack was to build a platform that could be used by all departments, of varying technical confidence, of the company that I was working at since existing open source documentation/wiki systems were positioned for a more technical audience.
It was the most painless experience I've had with quickly setting up docs from a bunch of .md files, and the plugins give it enough flexibility for most of the usual stuff I need.
My recommendations are:
- MkDocs: Good default choice, reasonably flexible.
- Jekyll: For people who want a little more flexibility—things like landing pages, blogs, etc.
- Antora: For people who want the best docs, and are willing to put in the most effort. It will manage, for you, the process of generating documentation sites that collect documentation from multiple projects and possibly multiple versions of each project. Asciidoc is full of features you’ll find useful.
Hugo looks like it has a lot of flexibility like Jekyll, but it seems to take more effort to get everything working the way you want, and it also seems like there’s just too much variation in how the different themes work.