Update the ESMValTool tutorial to use the same framework as the ESMValTool documentation

[ehogan]

At the User Engagement Team meeting in February 2025, I questioned the use of continuing to use the Software Carpentry template (I am struggling to see the benefits of using the Software Carpentry template, following the difficulties in #335).

I proposed using the same framework as the ESMValTool documentation, i.e. Sphinx and the PyData theme. Note the new Software Carpentry theme (example: https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/) does not look dissimilar to the Sphinx and the PyData theme.

Benefits of this approach include:

• Familiarity:
  • for the developers: hopefully those contributing to the tutorial have also contributed to the ESMValTool documentation (structure and syntax will be similar, no need to learn how to use additional tooling).
  • for the learners: the documentation and the tutorial will look the same.
• Less maintenance of environments:
  • the usual ESMValTool environment can be used when developing the tutorial.
  • there is no need to maintain seperate, difficult-to-build R-based environments.
• Hosting improvement:
  • the tutorial(s) could be hosted via Read the Docs.
  • Read the Docs allows changes to be rendered and viewed via PRs.

I brought this proposal to the Tech Lead Team meeting in March 2025, and the TLT agreed, but stated they would not be able to spare time to work on this.

Ideally, we should:

• Develop a new tutorial template using Sphinx and PyData in a new repository (tutorial-template?)
• Migrate the basic tutorial to a new repository (tutorial-basic?) using this new tutorial template (the markdown files will need translating to .rst files)
• Migrate the intermediate tutorial to a new repository (tutorial-intermediate?)

I would be happy to try to develop a template, but would others in the @ESMValGroup/userengagementteam be willing to migrate the tutorial to the new template? 🤞