Docsy 2024 Review: Adoptions and Enhancements

Celebrating Docsy’s 2024 growth in features and adoption, including a 57% usage increase, new features like dark mode, and improved internationalization support.
By Patrice Chalin (CNCF), for the Docsy Steering Committee |

As we reflect on 2024, it’s exciting to see steady progress toward the goals outlined in our 2024 priorities. This year, we focused on enhancing stability, improving internationalization, and delivering long-anticipated features like dark mode and continuous integration (CI) testing.

Docsy’s use increased by 57% in 2024, from 1.4K to 2.2K projects! 1

Let’s dive into the development highlights from 2024 and take a peek at what lies ahead.

Release highlights

We published three releases this year, each focusing on stability while introducing at least one major feature enhancement. Highlights include:

  • 0.9.0 added long-awaited:
    • CI testing via GitHub Actions to ensure quality and reliability across Linux and Windows.
    • Footer customization — Docsy’s longest-standing issue (#2)! — as well as improved repository links, and enhanced accessibility and look-and-feel.
  • 0.10.0:
    • Enabled color themes and dark mode via Bootstrap 5.3 upgrade, marking the completion of the Bootstrap 5 migration started in 2021. Also made adjustments to shortcodes and styles for dark-mode compatibility.
    • Addressed breaking changes resulting from the major core upgrade to Hugo 0.123.0.
  • 0.11.0:
    • Enhanced internationalization by reintroducing Right-To-Left (RTL) language support using Bootstrap’s RTL capabilities.

Major feature enhancements

In addition to CI testing, a key development feature contributing to Docsy’s stability, here are the major user-facing enhancements introduced in 2024.

Dark mode support

Dark mode support was the most upvoted Docsy enhancement prior to its debut in v0.10.0. Powered by Bootstrap 5.3 color themes, this Docsy feature includes a built-in light/dark mode menu selector for easy implementation.

We plan on enabling dark mode in the Docsy example, for even easier adoption. Dark mode has already been adopted in notable projects like OpenTelemetry (opentelemetry.io#4023).

Right-To-Left (RTL) language support

RTL language support (#1933), reintroduced through Bootstrap’s use of the mature and well-vetted RTLCSS framework, replaced Docsy’s deprecated custom RTL solution from 2023.

This enhancement meets longstanding multilingual documentation needs. Notably, RTL support has been requested by major Docsy-based sites, including the two 2024 top-velocity projects of the CNCF:

Adoptions and the Docsy Starter

One of the most exciting developments in 2024 has been Docsy’s growing adoption. GitHub analytics show a 57% increase in usage, reaching 2.2K projects as of this writing.

Adoption among CNCF projects has also grown since our 2023 report. This year, Linux Foundation mentees Sandra Dindi and Dariksha Ansari used the CNCF Docsy starter to migrate the following sites to Docsy:

Additionally, the Kubernetes website is undergoing a significant Docsy upgrade from v0.2, to align with the latest version and reduce technical debt:

The upgrade is progressing well, as shown in the ongoing efforts documented in the 0.3.x upgrade and 0.5.x upgrade.

What’s ahead?

Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue supporting the Docsy upgrade and adoption efforts by projects such as gRPC (grpc.io#1389) and Jaeger (jaegertracing#746).

For features tentatively planned for the first release of 2025, see Release 0.12.0 preparation #2108. The most upvoted enhancement requests are currently: 2

Thank you to all contributors and users who made 2024 a meaningful year for Docsy. Wishing you a fantastic end to 2024 and a great start to 2025! Let’s continue creating exceptional documentation together.

  1. Based on GitHub analytics Docsy dependents as of the time of writing. ↩︎

  2. Remember to vote for your most-desired feature. ↩︎

Last modified December 12, 2024: Blog 2024 review: Add link to LFX mentorships (#2147) (67f6b6a)