Thread: [Maven-plugins-developer] Re: Project's version on the site ?

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stéphane Mor" <ste...@ya...>
> I just noticed something : the project's version is written nowhere on 
> the site !!
> 
> Don't you think that would be a good info to provide ?

Yes, that would be nice. 

I even think that you could go a step further and provide links between different "important" versions of the site. For Maven that could ATM be the B4 release, the B6 release and HEAD. 

My first attempt to a solution for this is a small patch to the xdoc plugin. Please find it attached. It relies on the user adding a <otherVersions> element to the already existing navigation.xml file like this:

  <body>
    <otherVersions>
      <item name="Beta-4"                  href="http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/BETA4/"/>
      <item name="Beta-6"                  href="http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/"/>
      <item name="Beta-7-SNAPSHOT"         href="http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/SNAPSHOT/"/>
    </otherVersions>

The downside with this is that you have to apply this for every directory where you have a navigation.xml. I tried to put the info in the <versions> section of project.xml where the info really should live. That didn't work for me - so I suppose project.xml is not available in the dvsl context in the same way as the navigation.xml.

Another problem with this is that there will be dangling links when the page structure changes between versions. But on a project with a "nice stable" structure this problem would be minor. I have no good solution for this... which when thinking about it sounds like a familiar problem for many SCM systems :-(

A IMO Real Cool addition to all this would be the ability to mark up documentation changes as html-diffs between versions. This would help a lot of Maven users wanting to know exactly what has changed since last time they checked and I think it would be "more fun to help yourself as a user" :-) Which in turn would let developers spend more time on developing!

Another addition would be a page history section on each page with checkin comments.

> 
> Do you think of a good place to put it ?

With my current solution you can see the version as part of the URL for any page. I think this is simple and intuitive - but it would be trivial to ad it somewhere on the page to let it stand more out.

Thoughts on all this?

Thanks,
Jørn A Hansen

Thread: [Maven-plugins-developer] Re: Project's version on the site ?

maven-plugins-developer