The very first European Summit followed by an exciting AtlasCamp is in the books. It was a busy time, but we’re taking steps to make sure we’re regularly communicating our progress to people building add-ons and integrations for JIRA Cloud. You might have seen us engaging more regularly in discussions on the developer community. We revealed a lot of improvements during the Build a Better JIRA Add-on session at AtlasCamp.
In addition to communicating new features, we also give you visibility into our development priorities. Recently, the JIRA Cloud team opened up their roadmap of plans and projects for developers, so that you can stay up to date with what we’re working on. Check out the JIRA Cloud Platform API Roadmap board, which covers improvements to Atlassian Connect for JIRA Cloud, JIRA Cloud APIs, and other services that add-ons and integrations for JIRA Cloud rely on. If you want to provide feedback or ask about a specific project, feel free to comment on the project’s card or on the linked ACJIRA issue.
I’ll take this opportunity to follow up on those announcements and provide a few new ones.
Get closer to non-English speaking users
The ability to use the product in a language that is most comfortable for the user is one of the keys to improve users’ experience and increase their engagement. That’s why we’re making investments in improving the quality of already available languages as well as working on official support for more languages in JIRA Cloud. And we also want to give you the opportunity to provide a seamless journey for non-English speaking users of your JIRA add-ons.
We’re happy to announce that support for internationalization in Atlassian Connect is now available for you to implement in your add-ons, as explained in the new section in the Atlassian Connect docs. You can already get started adopting it, while we keep rolling out the feature progressively to all Atlassian Cloud sites from now until the end of June.
Webhooks for issue links and attachments
We know that many Atlassian Connect developers were suffering because webhooks for different types of issue events weren’t granular enough, or weren’t being sent at all. This was a big gap for many add-ons and integrations. For instance, the JRACLOUD-8505 request to add a new "Issue Linked" event for listeners to respond to, with over 500 votes made it to the top webhooks related suggestion on jira.atlassian.com. Similarly, issue attachments were another highly desired improvement by JIRA Cloud add-on developers.
Without those webhooks, it wasn’t possible for JIRA Cloud add-ons to react when attachments and links were added or removed from issues unless there was a comment added at the same time. As a workaround, add-ons that relied on links-based automation had to frequently pull down all issues just to check for updates in issue links. Unfortunately, this solution required more work from add-on developers and resulted in worse performance for JIRA users.
We’re pleased to announce that webhooks for both issue link and attachment events are now available for JIRA Cloud. With this improvement, you can much more easily set up custom integrations using IFTTT, Zapier and other similar services, or have your add-on immediately notified with new issue links and attachments. Check out the JIRA Cloud developer documentation for more information on using issue links and attachment webhooks.
Take a shortcut
Another extension, which has been available for JIRA Cloud developers since the end of April, is support for keyboard shortcuts for add-ons. Many JIRA users tell us that keyboard shortcuts are an invaluable productivity booster for them. Now add-ons for JIRA Cloud can declare keyboard shortcuts that will allow users to quickly navigate to a page, open a dialog module or invoke a web item action of the add-on. Refer to the JIRA Cloud developer documentation to learn more about implementing keyboard shortcuts.