The maven team is pleased to announce the Maven Announcement plugin 1.1 
release! 

http://maven.apache.org/maven-1.x/plugins/announcement/

The Announcement plugin generates release announcements. It uses the 
information found in both the POM and in the changes.xml file to generate the 
announcement text. 

Changes in this version include:

  New Features:

o Added description information from the POM to the generated announcement to 
  explain what the project does. 
o Added information in the generated announcement to indicate from where the 
  plugin can be downloaded. 
o Added information in the generated announcement to indicate how to install 
  the plugin using the plugin:download goal. 
o Added more information when running the plugin. Also added a check to 
  verify if the announcement version matches an entry in the changes.xml 
  file. Fixes MPANNOUNCEMENT-2. Thanks to Fabrizio Giustina. 
o Several new additions that makes the plugin more generic: the team name is 
  now taken from pom.groupId, "[]" are removed from the first line, changes 
  are sorted by type, changes report issue number and due-to, the download 
  link is generated from pom.distributionDirectory and the "plugin has been 
  tested with..." line has been removed. Fixes MPANNOUNCEMENT-1. Thanks to 
  Fabrizio Giustina. 

  Fixed bugs:

o Add a space after the "." of the "Fixes xxx." (which happens when you use 
  the "issue" attribute in changes.xml). 

  Changes:

o Added maven.announcement.file property and echo'd it during generation  

To automatically install the plugin, type the following on a single line:

maven plugin:download 
  -DgroupId=maven 
  -DartifactId=maven-announcement-plugin
  -Dversion=1.1

For a manual installation, you can download the Maven Announcement plugin 
here:

http://repo1.maven.org/maven/maven/plugins/maven-announcement-plugin-1.1.jar

Have fun!
-The development team