Liferay Issue Tracker (JIRA) Upgrade

Recently Liferay completely an upgrade of the software that powers issues.liferay.com.  We upgrade to JIRA 4.2.4, which is around 5 years newer than the one before!  As you can imagine, there have been a lot of improvements and new features, so I wanted to illustrate a few that I use and that you may find useful.  A full list of features is listed on the Atlassian site (some of which are only available to the site administrators), but the following should be accessible to all.

Labels

I've wanted these for a long time!  Labels are arbitrary tags associated with issues, which serve as handy filters and just-in-time categorization.  These are normally added when you are creating an issue, but for issues you own (or if you are an admin or Liferay staff), you can update these as needed.  While we don't have a taxonomy for these labels, I will be using it for the 100 PaperCuts program, and we may in the future use this as an additional way to categorize issues.

Autocomplete

Many fields in JIRA will now be auto-completed as you type.  For example, selecting Components for a new issue. This also works with Labels, Affected Versions, and others.  Whee!

Dashboards and OpenSocial Gadgets

A very cool new feature, this allows you to construct personal dashboards very similar to Liferay pages, dragging and dropping OpenSocial gadgets onto the page and arranging them as desired.  JIRA comes with a bunch of pre-defined gadgets, but you can also develop your own (and if its generally useful, let us know and we'll check it out and possibly deploy it on the main server!). You can generate lots of interesting graphs and quick links, as shown below:

The data/visualization graphs work against either a full project (like LPS), or against a pre-configured filter you or someone else defined.

Activity Streams

You can now construct customized activity streams, and subscribe to them via RSS.  Handy to keep abreast of the latest goings-on at issues.liferay.com.  Activity Streams are also shown on each project's default landing page:

Internationalization

JIRA supports many languages, so you can manage issues in whatever local language you desire.

Rich Text Comments

Now, your comments can come to life using wiki-like markup to make code snippets standout, quote text, or highlight various phrases.

Image Gallery

For issues that have attached images (screenshots, etc), a handy browser is included so you don't have to visit each image individually, or download them.

It even works for introspecting into .zip file attachments:

Remote RPC

Our JIRA instance can also be queried and interacted with through remote services (SOAP and XML-RPC).  While this was possible in the past, there were numerous bugs that prevented its use.  Seems to have been fixed!  The WSDL URL is http://issues.liferay.com/rpc/soap/jirasoapservice-v2?wsdl .

Greenhopper Plugin

Greenhopper is a plugin for JIRA that supports Agile Program Management practices.  We have been using this for a while but now it is open to the wider community.  It can be accessed via the "Agile" dropdown.

That's all for now. I'm sure there are many other new features just waiting to be discovered.  Have fun!

Blogs
Congratulations on the upgrade and thanks for the update James!!!
The new version is fantabulous, James. Thanks for the upgrade