Notice on now obsolete reportPlugin format

Since 1.4 (used by Maven Site Plugin 3.7), the request can (and should) be populated from pom's <reporting.plugins> section, injected in Mojo parameter as ${project.reporting.plugins} default value:

    @Parameter( defaultValue = "${project.reporting.plugins}", readonly = true )
    private org.apache.maven.model.ReportPlugin[] reportingPlugins;

This section is kept to explain what happened in previous releases of the component, but this approach has been abandonned so far after discovering major limitations: see Maven Site Plugin 3.9.0 documentation for more details.

Report plugins can be configured in <configuration> element of maven-site-plugin or any other report building plugin with following XML model corresponding to plugin's List<ReportPlugin> parameter:

<reportPlugins>
  <reportPlugin>
    <groupId/>
    <artifactId/>
    <version/>
    <configuration/>
    <reports/>
    <reportSets>
      <reportSet>
        <id/>
        <configuration/>
        <reports/>
      </reportSet>
    </reportSets>
  </reportPlugin>
</reportPlugins>

Notice this is the model from plugins in <reporting> section of POM:

• without <inherited> element: reporting plugins configuration inheritance is not supported at this level (see MSITE-484),
• with additional <reports> list outside <reportSet> that simplifies reports configuration in usual cases.

Maven 3 core makes an automatic transformation of <reporting> POM section (which supports configuration inheritance) to maven-site-plugin's reportPlugins configuration through the ReportingConverter component.

But Maven 3 does not do the same job for any other plugin wanting to use reports, like maven-pdf-plugin for example: this is one of the key limitations that made Maven team drop this approach.