• Article
  • Nov.27.2012

How to create rich content in JIRA issue fields

  • Nov.27.2012
  • Reading time mins

JEditor is a plugin which allows you to create rich content in JIRA fields, adding a rich text editor.

It is completely integrated into JIRA and once installed, a new renderer is available for free text fields (whether they are native or custom fields). This renderer brings new features displayed in a customizable toolbar located above your text fields while you edit them, see below:

Main features:

JEditor’s main features are:

  • Text formatting  (bold, underlined, text colouring, headings,  etc.)
  • Content insertion:
    • Pictures
    • Tables
    • Links
    • Mentioning users
    • Source code
    • etc.
  • Text and content formatting: alignment (left, right, centre)
  • Automatic draft saving
  • Word and Excel import

You can see below how the previously mentioned features are displayed in a JIRA issue. In this example, the “Description” field has been edited with JEditor:

Focus on some features

Mentioning JIRA users

When a user is mentioned with JEditor, a pop-up window is displayed when pointing over his/her name with the cursor. This pop-up window gives information about the user and also some links to pages related to him/her:

Inserting a table:

Just like in Confluence, a menu allows you to select the number of rows and columns of the table to create. Right-clicking on the table elements displays a menu giving access to various features, like insert, delete or properties:

Inserting code:

Some code can be inserted as well. Depending on the selected language, the different elements will be displayed in colours for the code to be more readable. The supported languages are C, C++, Css, Delphi, Javascript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, VB, XML/XHTML. In the following example, part of a XML document has been pasted. You can see below how it is seen in JIRA:

Import content from Word and Excel

Some content can be imported from a Word or Excel document with a simple copy & paste. The text formatting and the headings numbers are correctly displayed for the Word document, the cells positioning and the Excel table dimensions will also be retained.
The layout is not exactly the same as in the original document but still, this this simple copy & paste saves you time even if in most cases, the layout has to be arranged afterwards with JEditor.

Interested in testing JEditor?

On the plugin’s website you will find a “Product Sandbox” section where you can try the plugin directly without installing it on your JIRA instance. Keep in mind that the toolbar is customizable, it means that you can make it more complete or more simple, depending on your needs.

My opinion

JEditor adds a lot of more functionalities than what is natively available in the JIRA Wiki style renderer (default renderer for description and comment fields, among others). Even the use of very basic features (like bold, underlined, link, etc.) which are already present in the Wiki style renderer is more intuitive with JEditor, thanks to the toolbar.

Although this commercial plugin brings many features which are not that useful for most JIRA users (the more technical ones who are confident writing HTML directly), it is still interesting for the typing comfort and speed (creating a table is much faster) but also for the less advanced users who wouldn’t know how to format content without rich text tools.

Resources

JEditor website: http://jiraeditor.com Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.jiraeditor.jeditor

Related resources

View all resources