Excluding the publish date from Maven 2 sites

The Maven 2 site plugin includes by default a "Last Published" note on each HTML page. This is a nice feature for sites that are directly deployed to the server, but a bit troublesome for projects like Jackrabbit that first commit the generated site to version control before publishing it. The "Last Published" note tags all generated pages as modified even if no content changes are made.

To solve this issue I looked at the <publishDate/> configuration option in the site descriptor, but the only documented options for specifying the date location are left, right, navigation-top, navigation-bottom, and bottom. There is no option to simply disable the date being inserted in the document.

Looking at the default page template I however noticed that it's possible to trick the site not to include the publish date by using a dummy location like "none":

<publishDate position="none"/>

Works for me. :-) I also requested documenting this to avoid the hack getting broken in some future Maven version.