Openfire provides ways to customize application code as well as the Admin console, while maintaining that code in a separate location from the distribution source: http://www.igniterealtime.org/builds/openfire/docs/latest/documentation/overlay.html

The related infrastructure can use some minor tweaks:

• The page linked in this description has an incorrect title

• Web artifacts (images, javascript) from the overlay should be copied to the admin panel

• Subdirectories in the overlay layout should be included.

• When compiling the admin plugin, the overlay sources and libraries should be included.