An updated vision for Read the Docs¶
I’m excited that we published our 2025 vision for Read the Docs. It’s been a long-term goal to build more support for other documentation tools, and better UX for documentation authors and readers.
The major steps here have been:
Removing build magic: Removing the injection of data or configuration into your documentation builds. We used to have a full Sphinx extension that we injected, and a lot of configuration file manipulation for both Sphinx and MkDocs. This has been removed, which means builds should happen exactly as they do locally.
Adding build support for all tools: We built support into our build system for fully custom builds, which allows any build process that outputs HTML to be hosted on Read the Docs.
Adding frontend support for all tools: We rebuilt our flyout menu and the JavaScript that is injected into your documentation builds as a set of Read the Docs Addons. This enables granular configuration, and disabling of various frontend features via user settings.
Supporting custom integrations: We’re exposing all the data that we use to build Addons to documentation users, who can build custom data integrations. This allows you to integrate the versions from the API into a version selector, offline formats into a download UI, and provide an integrated UX for your users.
Our actual website is currently running on Read the Docs, and built with Pelican. Just a small example of what we can support now!
