In recent times, Maven Sites came close to becoming extinct. Maven Plugins were still using them for the wonderful automatic documentation page (named goals), but regular projects were not using them anymore.

However, Maven Sites have some huge benefits such as keeping the documentation close to the code, and automatically providing reports, information and API docs (Javadoc). Being able to release the documentation at the same time as the code was also a great advantage.

So why was this feature not used? Several reasons:

• The look and feel was terrible.
• The apt syntax was terrible.
• The customization was terrible.

Now, though, it’s possible to create much better Maven Sites using Twitter Bootstrap for the skinning and Markdown for the editing. Even better, if you use GitHub, your site can be automatically updated on your project’s GitHub page.

This blog post explains how to use all these new features.