I use the release plugin myself on almost all my projects, but--BUT--it needs to be said that it's not very flexible. If you can't live with the way it's setup to do things, you're better off writing a shell script to automate things your way than trying to bend the release plugin to fit your needs.
Comments
the maven-release-plugin is wonderful for this, and integrates nicely with Jenkins
I use the release plugin myself on almost all my projects, but--BUT--it needs to be said that it's not very flexible. If you can't live with the way it's setup to do things, you're better off writing a shell script to automate things your way than trying to bend the release plugin to fit your needs.