Being stuck at home may not be the most exciting, but it has given me lots of time to fix bugs and make Orchid better for you! This latest release, 0.21.0, includes many bug fixes identified (and sometimes fixed!) by the community, and also boasts some significant internal changes which improve Orchid's overall performance and prepare a major portion of its functionality to be pulled into a standalone library (which you'll absolutely want to check out when it's released).

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

The Orchid community is growing larger all the time, and the repo is now at 367 stars!

Orchid also received contributions from Mikko Värri for improvements to sitemaps, and Javier Segovia Córdoba with documentation fixes.

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?

Full release notes and a migration guide are available here. Here's a summary of what to expect in 0.21.0:

• Experimental sourcedocs are now enabled by default and do not need a CLI flag to use.
• Sourcedocs modules can now cross-link between each other for multi-module projects, or those with multiple interlinked sourcesets (like Kotlin MPP).
• Collections have become the base unit of organizing groups of pages in Orchid, and there is now a collectionPages menu item to display pages from a collection from any plugin.
• Asset management is greatly improved, and support for downloading and inlining CSS and JS assets is now available from config.yml as well as from plugin code.
• Diagnostic output across the board is generally improved. Pebble templates are now more descriptive about errors with better line-number tracking (to aid in resolving specific Pebble template issues), and OrchidTest now only shows HTML selectors from the test instead of the entire rendered page.

In Progress

Continued work is underway to support relative URLs (for viewing an Orchid site without needing a local fileserver). In addition, Orchid's resource/file management is a core subsystem that would do well to be a separate library, and work is in progress to move it out of Orchid and into Arcana, it's own library. This library will be Kotlin multiplatform-enabled, bringing Orchid's simple and flexible file-management APIs to Android, iOS, JS, and of course, pure JVM.

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!