A common theme in the "maven is hard" thread is bad documentation and I'd like to explore this a little. For the sake of discussion, lets separate the plugin docs from the maven site. (Why? Because each plugin site is like it's own little world and some are good and some are bad. We can have that discussion after)
I took a look at our site again. The first thing I notice is that it is mostly setup towards grabbing new users with the big "Learning about Maven" section. This is ok for total newbies, but quickly runs out of steam. I also took another look at the Ant site that everyone raves about. The major difference I see is the link prominently titled "Manual" Once you go into the manual however, it is still a little tough to drive down to what you need. You have to know what you're looking for before you can find it. I don't think the Ant manual is all too different from this page: http://maven.apache.org/guides/index.html The thing I'd like to know is what is missing from this list that should be there? I think there is some potential to be gained from taking all those docs and arranging them in a more cohesive structure, but I do think that lots of information is there. Unfortunately we aren't all great technical writers, nor were the docs written as a book. This is where the BBWM and Sonatype books come in handy. They are meant as an end to end resource and where done with some Tech Writing help (I'm assuming here). Lets list some positive improvements that can be made to the existing Maven site in this thread. Thanks, Brian
