mkdocs-material theme is in maitenance mode

[2bndy5]

According to their recent announcement, mkdocs-material theme (upstream source for this theme) has entered maintenance mode.

What does this mean for sphinx-immaterial?

For now, we'll simply try to keep the theme working. But this does pose a couple opportunities:

Deviation from upstream implementation

Part of the difficulty maintaining this theme has always been the restriction to not deviate (too far) from upstream implementation. Now, that upstream has entered maintenance mode, we might be more flexible in this regard.

Insider features are now generally available

As mentioned in the linked announcement, all insider features are now generally available. However, It is unrealistic to expect these features to magically just work when we merge v9.7.0 changes into our sphinx-immaterial port.

Each new feature should be tracked and discussed in a separate thread/issue before boasting/documenting support for them in this theme.

[jbms]

I haven't looked at Zensical too much, but it appears that they are just replacing mkdocs with their own generator program, but the portion of the theme that we use, namely the HTML templates, JavaScript, and CSS, may not be changing too much. The zensical version of those files are here: https://github.com/zensical/ui and from a quick look do not appear to be very different from what is in mkdocs-material.

[2bndy5]

I believe they have a long way to go with before achieving much of their stated roadmap. Overall, I'm not impressed with zensical; a lot of their site sounds like a trumped up sales pitch. But then again, I was never a huge fan of mkdocs, particularly because of the patchwork of markdown extensions needed to compete with rST. I think that material theme alone was driving most of the continued interest in mkdocs, so it may be worth keeping an eye on zensical.