documentation ideas

documenting this would be good too:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAVEN-1219#action_19968

also, add an FAQ:
I don't think jelly:maven should extend jelly:core, but I don't really want to change it now... I think we'll have to live with it for now and call it deprecated and semi-removed I'll add an FAQ.

this is a test

Speaking of documentation, it would be nice to have a news page that gets updated when new plugin versions are released, now that plugins are maintained separately from the Maven core itself.

Most people I know don't bother checking every plugin's page for new versions (due to the overwhelming number of plugins) so they simply wait for a new Maven version.

Having a news page that announces new plugin versions would be a (neat and) simple solution that would allow people to update their maven installation functionality more frequently, and remove the burden from the maven core developers.

I'm sure this can be automated if all maven plugins extend a base maven-plugin.xml project file which would update that page.

What do you think?

Users sometimes get confused with the developper documentation.
Especially for end-user projects such as a text processer, this is true.

I believe the site plugin should by default have the notion of "user documentation" and "developper documentation" and clearly seperate them. Also the generated reports should have a notion to which they belong (checkstyle, FAQ).
Every project has people just using it and other improving it too.

The developper documentation (conventions, UML diagrams, etc) belongs with the generated developper reports, while the user generated FAQ's can be linked from the user docs.

This would make it easy to implement a property includeDevelopperDocumentation for end-user releases etc.

The catch here is that there could be 2 FAQ's generated: one for users and one for developpers.

Also it would be nice if resources in the project could be reused in the xdocs.

For example icons used in the toolbar of the application can be reused to explain their actions in the xdocs.

funnily enough, Jason and I discussed this idea just a couple of days ago
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAVEN-1287#action_23977
I've always thought the site should be split that way, but we are thinking of ways that Maven could facilitate that for all projects.

from this, only http://xstream.codehaus.org/versioning.html left to do

Closing as outdated, - documentation ideas are now gathered for m2.