There's now a publicly installable v2, see the docs... https://www.encode.io/mkdocs/

pip install https://www.encode.io/mkdocs/mkdocs-2.0.dev0.tar.gz

There's also a couple of themes available, see...

• https://github.com/lovelydinosaur/mkdocs-theme
• https://github.com/lovelydinosaur/kelp-theme

Likely that there are various part of how the theming works that will change slightly as things evolve... though there should be enough of a start there to find your way around.

< CLEAR SARCASM >*
This is wonderful!

• Answer to disliked “smokey boys-only-club atmosphere” is to limit code access or keep it private
• Envisioning future that doesn’t “support plugins in order to customise the page generation”
• Announcing two themes, one of them requiring a a $79 per project license

Thank you, @lovelydinosaur — all this definitely confirms that I need to ASAP move all my MkDocs-based sites to https://zensical.org/
< / CLEAR SARCASM >

• Edited to indicate clear sarcasm

I'm just a long-time mkdocs user without much context about this change, so please forgive my ignorance.

1. If this is ostensibly version 2.0 of mkdocs, why does it live in a new repository?
2. Under what license is mkdocs v2.0 being released? There does not appear to be any license attached to the code currently.
3. Why are community members being discouraged from engaging with the project on GitHub?

It's very possible that I've misread the intent here, but this does not seem like a viable path forward for an open source project.

A bit of unsolicited advice as an open-source maintainer who has made many mistakes. Much of a project's success comes from the community's perception of stability, transparency, and openness. When you attach yourself to a project such as MkDocs, any major revisions should maintain the spiritual essence of what made the project great, only changing things insofar that it makes its users's lives easier or achieves its goals more effectively.

With such a popular project as MkDocs, I would have expected major revisions to it to include a period of public comment on a technical design document. This allows you to gather feedback early before engineering effort has been committed and before you go down a path that might end up in wasted effort. If your goal is wide adoption of your project, you need community buy-in for anything substantial.

It seems this is not the approach you're taking in v2. Instead, it appears you prefer to run this as a dictatorship, perhaps as a pet project, with minimal community support and engagement being actively discouraged. The justification provided feels like it's missing the point. Successful OSS projects are never operated by approving every issue or PR that comes through the door. Maintainers have always had final say. The solution you provide antagonizes your community because it removes a tool (issues and PRs) that anyone can submit and anyone can vote or comment on. This provides maintainers a useful signal for what the community actually cares about. Your solution of using chat rooms is not a scalable method for gauging community sentiment. If you have a problem with stale open issues, there are many tools that can automate management of that. You can make rules around it. Saying issues or PRs are not welcome sends the message, intentional or not, that you do not care about community engagement. This may work fine for a personal project, but it's not a winning stance of a mature open source platform with many stakeholders.

MkDocs has been plagued with maintainer drama. @squidfunk rightfully realized that the maintenance problems with MkDocs were threatening to his business model. The foundation relied on people with seemingly poor social skills and an inability to run a successful open source project. He made the right choice — this community is too unstable.

You cannot claim to revive a mature OSS ecosystem while centralizing authority, restricting collaboration, and minimizing engagement. I wish you the best in your endeavors and I hope you take what I and others here say into serious consideration. Continuing on the path you are will not result in community adoption.