You should really read all of JoeS's writing on this topic, but, in short: Infrastructure draws a sharp distinction between 'the web site' and 'the wiki' for a project. They want 'the web site' to be published, via svn, as static HTML. No Confluence, no PHP, no nothing.
To that end, Joe built a new CMS from scratch. Its uses markdown to ease the markup process, and it operates on files stored in svn. There are apparently javascript scriptlets to give you some level of convenience in editing in it. I haven't use it yet, myself. The original position of infra was that all use of confluence for 'the web site' would cease at Apache. Confluence would remain in use only for 'the wiki'. Dan Kulp of CXF and other projects really, really, didn't want to give up the convenience and expressive range of Confluence as a CMS for 'the web site'. So, he built a brand new static export tool for confluence that meets the stated requirements of the infrastructure team, and deployed it for CXF. Infrastructure will insist that Mahout achieve static publication *somehow*. The simplest thing we can do is adopt Dan's technology to render the confluence content into static HTML.
