For those who want to customize your JForum installation, just download this attachment and take a look.

I don't understand your question, maybe you need to provide more information.
If you want to change the maven behavior defined in pom.xml, you may check the maven-war-plugin first.
See http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/

Tomcat (and possibly other servlet containers) can run web apps out of an exploded war file -and without any war file, actually-, so once you have done the initial install you can work with the directory hierarchy and not use the war file.