Visit my.sonatype.com for documentation on Nexus Repository version 2.
With the Sonatype Nexus Repository Professional 2 release the Nexus Staging Maven Plugin and Nexus Staging Ant Tasks were introduced. They introduce a new staging mode that allows for the client-side creation of a local staging directory and implementation of a deferred, end-of-build, deployment mechanism. The maven plugin and ant tasks are available free of charge, making them usable against any Nexus Repository 2 Professional instance, including forges like https://oss.sonatype.org.
With these new tools, It is possible to explicitly target a specific staging profile in the deployment process instead of relying on implicit matching using repository targets. This reduces the setup complexity and makes the configuration less error-prone.
While the Maven plugin can be used to seamlessly replace the maven-deploy-plugin, the new tools provide goals and tasks to manage the whole staging flow from the command line including closing, promoting, releasing, and dropping staging repositories.