TheNEXUS

To illustrate the process of building a project website, create a sample Maven project with the archetype plugin:

$ mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.sonatype.mavenbook -DartifactId=sample-project

This creates the simplest possible Maven project with one Java class in src/main/java and a simple POM. You can then build a Maven site by simply running mvn site. To build the site and preview the result in a browser, you can run mvn site:run, this will build the site and start an embedded instance of Jetty.

$ cd sample-project
$ mvn site:run
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'site'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building sample-project
[INFO]task-segment: [site:run] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Setting property: classpath.resource.loader.class =>
'org.codehaus.plexus.velocity.ContextClassLoaderResourceLoader'.
[INFO] Setting property: velocimacro.messages.on => 'false'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.loader => 'classpath'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.manager.logwhenfound => 'false'.
[INFO] [site:run]
2008-04-26 11:52:26.981::INFO:  Logging to STDERR via org.mortbay.log.StdErrLog
[INFO] Starting Jetty on http://localhost:8080/
2008-04-26 11:52:26.046::INFO:  jetty-6.1.5
2008-04-26 11:52:26.156::INFO:  NO JSP Support for /, did not find
org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet
2008-04-26 11:52:26.244::INFO:  Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:8080

Once Jetty starts and is listening to port 8080, you can see the project’s site when you go to http://localhost:8080/ in a web browser. You can see the results in Figure 10.1, “Simple Generated Maven Site”.

Figure 10.1. Simple Generated Maven Site

If you click around on this simple site, you’ll see that it isn’t very helpful as a real project site. There’s just nothing there (and it doesn’t look very good). Since the sample-project hasn’t configured any developers, mailing lists, issue tracking providers, or source code repositories, all of these pages on the project site will have no information. Even the index page of the site states, "There is currently no description associated with this project". To customize the site, you’ll have to start to add content to the project and to the project’s POM.

If you are going to use the Maven Site plugin to build your project’s site, you’ll want to customize it. You will want to populate some of the important fields in the POM that tell Maven about the people participating in the project, and you’ll want to customize the left-hand navigation menu and the links visible in the header of the page. To customize the contents of the site and affect the contents of the left-hand navigation menu, you will need to edit the site descriptor.