add reusable skin functionality and create skins default, stylus and classic

The themes needs to be packaged up in a jar/zip so that it can easily be retrieved and applied to a site. Applying the new look and feel to all the Maven sites was tedious.

Before applying simply pack up the theme in a JAR so it can be easily applied.

so, themes that are like archetypes in terms of packaging, distribution, and reference?

currently the theming is just an alternate stylesheet, but I think want Jason wants to do is zip up a set of images related to the css, the css and perhaps the velocity template if it is different?

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Sites+and+Inheritence

Might be a stupid question, but... if this bug is fixed, where do the skins reside, exactly? If I enable the snapshots.maven.codehaus.org pluginRepository and attempt to run the site:site goal, it dies with the error:

[INFO] artifact org.apache.maven.skins:maven-default-skin: checking for updates from central
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] The skin does not exist: Unable to determine the release version

org.apache.maven.skins:maven-default-skin:jar:RELEASE

The skin functionality in maven-site-plugin is done, but not yet released. The same goes for the skins. Until they are released you need to add a SNAPSHOT-version to them, like this:

<skin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.skins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-site-skin</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</skin>

I also had this error, so to help anyone else looking for this my issue was that the maven-metadata-central.xml file in the repo under org/apache/maven/skins/maven-default-skin did not have the versioning element. This may have been as a result of some old cached file somewhere.

The complete file (as per http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/maven/skins/maven-default-skin/maven-metadata.xml) is below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><metadata>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.skins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-default-skin</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<versioning>
<release>1.0</release>
<versions>
<version>1.0</version>
</versions>
<lastUpdated>20060507032433</lastUpdated>
</versioning>
</metadata>

See also MNG-3139