The next major version of Orchid, 0.19.0, is now available! Check out the full release notes here, and stick around for a general update of the development and community around Orchid!

This is the official Orchid newsletter, the newest and best documentation site generator. There is a growing need to keep the community up-to-date on all the happenings around Orchid, and here I will share Orchid's progress, milestones, and future plans! Follow along with this series to stay on top of Orchid's newest features, track adoption on Github, and see who's using Orchid!

On Github

Orchid is now at 329 stars on Github, and since the last newsletter has received a PR from tomb50 to improve Orchid's Asciidoctor integration. And thank you to everyone else who has been giving Orchid a try, reaching out with questions and feedback, and generally supporting this growing community!

What's New?

Since the release of 0.18.0, I've been able to work on many smaller "quality-of-life" improvements to Orchid that have been suggested by the community. Some of these changes required breaking the internal API (thus the major version bump to 0.19.0), but the last few releases have mainly just been smaller new features and improvements to existing plugins. Below are the new features available in 0.19.0:

• Improve Asciidoc formatting. Specifically, other files relative to the source file can now be included.
• Automatically add CNAME files to GithubPages deploys, if not already present in the deployed site. The CNAME value will be inferred from the base URL of the site during the deploy.
• Adds feedLinks metaComponent to Posts plugin, which adds <link rel='alternate'> tags to page heads, pointing to the generated feed pages.
• Images uploaded and referenced from GitLab wikis are now copied over automatically with the rest of the site

Full release notes and a migration guide are available here.

In Progress

Most work over the past month has been refactoring needed to support a better Asciidoctor experience, and generally clean up some of the older parts of the Orchid codebase. This is work that will eventually be extracted to a separate library, so be on the look-out for that!

There is still work to be done with the Asciidoctor integration, but it's getting better all the time, and work on the Snippets plugin will be picking back up soon, too. I've already had some good feedback and suggestions for this feature which I will be taking into account as I build it out, so be sure to leave your thoughts on the appropriate issue, to make this plugin exactly what you need!

Are you interested in getting started with Orchid? There simply is no better way to manage all the documentation for your project, and I'd love to help you get set up!

If you have an open-source project that needs docs, are building a new portfolio, or are building any other kind of static site, I want to work with you to get you set up with Orchid! Comment on this post, send me a PM here on Dev.to, reach out on Gitter, or contact me here and I will be with you every step of the way.

And as always, let me know if you start using Orchid so I can feature you in the next update!