Best practice: Versioning and releases in multiprojects

What is the best practice for versioning and release management in the following case with multiprojects?

Project structure

• global parent
  • parent project (Version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT)
    • child project 1 (same like parent)
    • child project 2 (same like parent)
    • child project 3 (same like parent)
    • child project 4 (same like parent)
    • …

I want to set only one time the version for the parent and all child projects, because every part of the project must have the same version.

Also what i want is, to release the project with continuum/maven.

Current "bad" solution:

Normaly a easy way should be to set the version in the parent pom and say in every child „last version from parent“ but this dont work with maven <3.1 (See here)[http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-624] Now i set in every child project the version of the parent project and for every release i must change the version in all childs and the parent.

Example:

Parent

<groupId>com.test</groupId>
<artifactId>com.test.buildDefinition</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

Child

<parent>
    <groupId>com.test</groupId>
    <artifactId>com.test.buildDefinition</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>

<groupId>com.test</groupId>
<artifactId>com.test.project</artifactId>
<version>${parent.version}</version>

If i want to release my projects now with Continuum i use the following order to release it:

1. Parent Project
2. Child Project 1
3. Child Project 2
4. …

But this dont work, because after changeing the version of the parent, the childs dont have anymore a SNAPSHOT version in the parent and i think there must be a better way to release a multiproject with continuum.