Hi again! I thought I’d follow up last weeks feature rundown with some other cool stuff we’re doing.

Since we, like most developers, spend our days submerged in tooling. Maven, Jenkins, Eclipse, JRebel and tons more. At Polopoly, we try to be dilligent about contributing back fixes to Open source projects we use. You can find patches, bug reports and pull requests from us on everything from Velocity and SolR to jQuery UI and Firefox.

As of a few weeks ago, we’ve started pushing up some of our own stuff on our GitHub account, and since we’d love pull requests, I thought I’d just write about them a bit.

Here you’ll find, amongst others, two Maven plugins to make life easier when dealing with Less CSS and unminified and unconcatenated Javascript. You’ll also find patches we’ve done to Jenkins plugins for Git and EC2 that haven’t made their way back to core yet and a JRebel plugin that allows you to update files on content from JRebel, without having to reimport them by reading them from the file system instead. If you deal a lot with output templates in plugins, it allows you to re-read the velocity files as you go.

And you’ll also find one plugin for Eclipse, pp-eclipse, that contains a life saving feature when you’re dealing with a ton of input templates, ”Open by external id”. Pressing Shift+Alt+P gives you the familiar ”Open Type” dialog, but with content instead. It does this by indexing all the XML in your project, and is in general pretty awesome. It also contains a shortcut to import Content XML quickly, Shift+Alt+X.

As I said, a few very useful tools that we’d love to get your contributions on.