JIRA 3.8 Release Notes

Atlassian is proud to announce JIRA 3.8, the latest release of our award winning issue tracking, workflow and project management software. 

New features include:

• Editable comments
• Self-installer for JIRA
• CAPTCHA for new account signup
• Integration with Crowd
• Improvements to the Bugzilla importer

Feature preview:

• DHTML-loading of Issue screens

This release also includes more than 30 bug fixes.

To see a list of all new features and improvements — ask JIRA!

Upgrading

JIRA 3.8 is a free upgrade for any customer who purchased/renewed JIRA after 9 March, 2006. This release can be downloaded from the JIRA Download Center. Before upgrading, please refer to the JIRA 3.8 Upgrade Guide.

Editable comments

SPECIAL NOTE: Thank you to the 175 people who voted on this feature request. Your input is vital to planning the JIRA development roadmap, and we appreciate you taking the time to tell us what is important to you.

Issue comments can now be edited. To ensure that comments can only be edited appropriately, two new project permissions have been provided so that you can restrict the ability to edit comments:

• 'Edit Own Comments' -- this allows users to edit comments which they have created. This permission is typically granted to end-users.
• 'Edit All Comments' -- this allows users to edit comments which other people have created. This permission is typically granted to administrators.

If a comment has been edited, the word 'Edited' will appear in the comment trail. You can hover your mouse over the word 'Edited' to see who edited the comment and when, e.g.:


 
You can also configure email notifications to be sent when the 'Comment Edited' event occurs.

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Self-installer for JIRA

New and existing customers can get the latest version of JIRA up and running on Windows within minutes, using our new installer. No more setting environment variables, installing Java, and running things from the command line. Even novice users will be able to access JIRA in as little as 5 clicks after the download.



For your convenience, we have even added controls to the Start Menu to make life as easy as possible:



We also bundle JIRA with the latest Sun JRE (Java 6.0), so there is no need for a separate download and installation. It all comes packaged and ready to run!

• Self extracting -- no need for Winzip or any other tools.
• Optional installation as a Windows Service.
• 'Start' and 'Stop' menu items, for both normal installation and Windows Service installation.
• Tested on Windows Vista.
• Detection of any other JIRA instances installed on the same machine.
• Port detection (detects if any other web servers are running on the machine and resolves conflicts).
• Uninstaller (not that you will be needing it).

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CAPTCHA for new account signup

If your JIRA server is accessible from outside your organisation's firewall, and you have enabled signup, then you may want to also enable CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA helps ensure that only real humans (and not automated spam systems) can sign themselves up to JIRA. When CAPTCHA is enabled, visitors will need to recognise a distorted picture of a word (e.g. "pctding" in the screenshot below), and must type the word into a text field. This is easy for humans to do, but very difficult for computers. We are hoping that this feature will help to fight evil JIRA spammers (see JRA-12293 for some of the background to this.)

We recommend anyone running a public JIRA instance (e.g. Codehaus, Apache, OpenSymphony) to enable this feature.

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Integration with Crowd

JIRA can now be integrated with Atlassian Crowd, which is useful for organisations that have multiple user-repositories.

• How to integrate Crowd with JIRA

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Improvements to the Bugzilla importer

JIRA's Bugzilla importer has been enhanced. When importing Bugzilla bugs and creating corresponding issues, JIRA will now:

• create Issue Links of type 'Duplicate' between issues that have been imported and marked as duplicates in Bugzilla. The 'Duplicate' link type will be automatically created if it doesn't exist.
• import Component Lead information.
• concatenate the 'URL' field (from Bugzilla) to the 'Environment' field in JIRA issues.

Many thanks to Vladimir Alexiev for his contributions.

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DHTML-loading of Issue screens (Feature Preview)

To facilitate faster loading of issue screens (e.g. the "Edit Issue" screen and the "Resolve Issue" screen), we are working on a feature that will allow JIRA to re-load only those parts of the screen that have changed. We hope this will save a little of your valuable time, and improve your experience with JIRA.

This feature is shipped in JIRA 3.8, but as it has a few known problems (JRA-12348 and JRA-12349) it is disabled by default. The known problems should not affect many users, so we encourage you to turn it on and provide any feedback by adding comments to this page. We would especially like to hear if you believe the feature is useful or if you find any problems that we are not aware of.

To enable the feature, please navigate to Administration -> General Configuration and enable the 'Dynamic HTML for issue screens' option.
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