On the create release page please add a checkbox and a new textfield, if both are set add the following strings at the end of the release command line:

release:branch -DbranchName=${textfieldvalue}

It would be great, if the default for the textfield could be "${project.artifactId}-${project.version}_BRANCH" with

• all dots replaced by "_" (CVS does not allow dots)
• "-SNAPSHOT" removed

Background: In our process we usually create a release for production and then we continue working in HEAD/trunk for the next release.

But usually we need a branch, either as release branch for fixing last minute bugs or as maintenance branch for bugfix releases prior to the next rollout.
So we have on allmost every release the manual work of creating a branch for many many multimodule builds. It would be great include that in the Jenkins release.