Because plugin versions are managed by Forrest automatically it is possible 
to deploy and/or release individual plugins independantly of Forrest and 
other plugins. Before we discuss this process lets first look at the difference
between releasing a plugin and deploying a plugin.

Deploy or Release?
------------------

Plugins are automatically downloaded and installed whenever they are needed by a 
Forrest project. In order for this to happen it is necessary to deploy the
plugin to a download server. Plugins may be deployed at any time during their
development cycle, that is a developer may choose to deploy a plugin that has not
yet been fully tested. This enables the plugin to be tested "in the field", by
its users.

Since users are able to opt to use a specfic version of a plugin those working in
production environments can ensure that these interim test deployments do not 
affect their work.

Releasing a plugin is the act of deploying a fully tested plugin available for use.
This process will generally be more than just making the plugin available via a 
download site, it will usually involve making public announcements, tagging the 
source tree, incrementing version numbers and other such maintenance tasks.

Deploying a Plugin
------------------

By convention a plugin that has not been fully tested will have '-dev' appended 
to the version number in the plugins build.xml file.

To deploy on the Apache Forrest download server you will need to be a committer.
Simply change directory to the plugin home directory and deploy the plugin
by doing 'tools/ant/bin/ant deploy' [1]. The build system will take care of
everything else for you.

[1] See the note about using our own version of Ant:
http://forrest.apache.org/0.7/docs/howto/howto-buildPlugin.html#ant

Releasing a Plugin
------------------

The only difference between deploying and releasing a plugin from the point of
view of making the download available is that the plugin version number will
have the '-dev' postfix removed in build.xml before the "ant deploy" target is
run.

Once the deployment is complete the version number should be increased and the 
'-dev' postfix will be appended.

TODO: announcement emails
TODO: tagging source tree