Hey Keith!

Regarding instaling plugins from Maven - we'd definitely like to support this. Perhaps we could take what you've done and standardize it as a supported plugin installation mechanism?

Regarding testing the plugins in a forge release distribution. As of Forge 1.0.3.Final, you can invoke Forge from the command line using:

forge -e "command or script to run"

So hopefully that will be of use :) You can install plugins using this feature as well, so with the combination of the two, we should have some good testing options!

--
Lincoln Baxter, III
http://ocpsoft.org
"Simpler is better."