Hi, Tony. Great feedback. We can try to do a better job explaining the changes (recent releases have indeed made several changes in the AS7 configuration). This will be more important after 3.0.0.Final, at which point we hope to be making very few (if any) changes to the "standalone-modeshape.xml" configuration file.

We do have a document that explains what changes we've made to the "standalone-modeshape.xml" configuration file, and it actually shows how you can use AS7's CLI to apply these changes to your own configuration. This is actually the recommended practice. Plus, you can even use the CLI to apply your own changes (e.g., your datasources, email, additional ModeShape configuration changes, etc.). IMO, this isn't terribly straightforward, but if you can figure it out then you can collect all the individual CLI commands into a batch script and run the script against many different servers, even when those servers have different configurations (e.g., development, staging, production). This is a killer feature of AS7.

We do plan to create a CLI script that you can just run to add ModeShape, but you can easily do now this by following our aforementioned documentation.