If you want to use M.E.T.A., you need maven. The current Maven release is 1.0 and proved to be stable and working well with the M.E.T.A. plugin. You can either get a binary or a source distribution from the Maven site.
After installing Maven, you can use the following maven command to download and install the plugin in one go:
maven -DartifactId=maven-turbine-plugin -DgroupId=turbine -Dversion=1.2 plugin:download
Installing the plugin through the plugin:download is the preferred to go.
Alternatively, you can get it from the Turbine download page.
| M.E.T.A. Plugin (Version 1.2) | 
To install it manually, you copy this jar file into your local plugin directory, which is either referenced by MAVEN_HOME_LOCAL/plugins or the global plugins directory at MAVEN_HOME/plugins. Which one to use depends on your maven installation. You find some documentation on how to do this on the maven install page.
After the installation, run maven -g and check whether the following
targets are displayed in the goal list:
[turbine]                           ( NO DEFAULT GOAL )
  deploy  ......................... Deploys the Application into a local web
                                    container for testing
  install-libs  ................... updates the libraries for an inplace
                                    application
  setup  .......................... Setup a new Turbine web application
  sql  ............................ Build the SQL files necessary for the
                                    application
  war  ............................ Generate a Turbine based Web application (
                                    war)
You are now ready to use M.E.T.A. Continue to the Getting Started page.