As we discussed earlier, more and more standard functionalities are pushed into bundled plugins as opposed to the JIRA core product. There is no better way to showcase the plugin architecture, I must admit! But that does make the life of high end users who want to modify those functionalities a bit difficult.
Let me take a once simple scenario such as "I want to display the description before the issue details in the View Issue page."
This used to be pretty easy, because all you needed to do was to modify the relevant JSP file and that's it! But now, the View Issue screen rendering is done by jira-view-issue-plugin and it is an Atlassian system plugin. Although the actual work is simple—we only need to modify the atlassian-plugin.xml file—making those changes effective is not as simple as editing the jira-view-issue-plugin-xxx.jar file from the JIRA_Home/.plugins/bundled-plugins folder.
Let us see why!