Migrate from MkDocs-Material to Zensical

[jrcain-usgs]

MkDocs 1.0 is unmaintained - seems it will be effectively deprecated. MkDocs 2.0 is dropping plugin support, and thereby dropping MkDocs-Material support.

The developers of MkDocs Material have written a new docs site generator, Zensical, designed to be backwards compatible with MkDocs-Material.

Their blog explaining the situation:
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/blog/2026/02/18/mkdocs-2.0/

Extension Support

• I replaced all neoteroi.cards with supported native cards and removed that extension in Home/Category pages updates, remove old-style cards #191
• The codehilite extension has alredy replaced by pymdownx.highlight and pymdownx.inlinehilite. codehilite can be removed from our mkdocs.yml without affecting functionality.
• All other current markdown extensions appear to be supported.

Plugin Support

• search: No longer needed, replaced by Zensical's integrated Disco search engine.
• mermaid: Replaced by Mermaid Superfence. See Zensical Diagrams.
• mknotebooks is not supported by Zensical. We currently have 6 notebooks. An alternative, mkdocs-jupyter, is in Zensical's backlog of plugins to support. Support plugin mkdocs-jupyter zensical/zensical#52
• mkdocs-llmstxt is in Zensical's backlog.
• mkdocs-redirects is in Zensical's backlog. We currently have 1 redirect.

See Zensical's backlog.