The particular change we previously talked about is included in the jBPM 5.2 release, so you could get that 5.2 full installer (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm/files/jBPM%205/jbpm-5.2.0.Final/) for example and test it out. To answer your question, after making changes to bpm-console you would build it with
mvn clean install -Dconsole.profile=jbpm
You would also need to change the dependency versions specified in the jBPM poms to make sure they are using the bpm-console version you just built and re-build jBPM with
mvn clean install -Dfull -DskipTests
At this point you can start using the zip files created in the jbpm-distribution module
Hope this helps.