The Jira Legacy macro is becoming the Jira Data Center macro

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

We are announcing that on April 9th, 2026 (6 months from now), for Confluence Cloud, the Jira Legacy macro will become the Jira Data Center macro in the cloud editor. This means that:

• Jira Legacy macro (also known as Jira Issue Macro) will no longer support the insertion of Jira Cloud issues. Customers can instead use the new and improved Jira Work Items (also known as Jira List of Links/SLLV) to insert Jira Cloud issues.

• Customers using Confluence Cloud and Jira Data Center will still be able to use the Jira Legacy macro (now called Jira Data Center) to insert Jira Data Center issues.

• Customers who are not using the cloud editor, and are still using the legacy editor will still be able to use Jira Legacy macro to insert both Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center issues until legacy editor is deprecated.

Jira Work Items: Experience Upgrades and Key Feature Parity

We’re also upgrading Jira Work Items to provide a better and more intuitive experience by addressing key feature gaps from the Jira Legacy macro. This will enable teams to confidently manage Jira items in Confluence as we move toward a unified and modern integration. We will address the following tickets:

• ConfCloud-77443: Jira Work Items will be displayed within the body of content macros as tables.

• ConfCloud-77510: Jira Work Items will display images from Jira Issues.

• ConfCloud-77556: Jira Work Items will support rich text in displayed fields.

• ConfCloud-77661: We will enable Jira Work Items to include all listed issues in Word/PDF exports.

Detailed Plan

Starting April 9th, 2026,

• The Jira Legacy macro will become Jira Data Center macro. Customers will no longer be able to insert Jira Cloud issues with it.

• Existing instances of the Jira Legacy macro used to insert Jira Cloud issues on cloud editor pages will be automatically converted to the new and improved Jira Work Items.

FAQ

Can you make sure that Jira issues supports rendering in bodied macros (CONFCLOUD-77443) before the Jira Legacy macro becomes Jira Data Center?

• Yes, we plan to resolve this issue before the Jira Legacy macro becomes Jira Data Center.

What happens to Jira Legacy macros when a legacy editor page is converted to the cloud editor?

• Once the page is converted to the cloud editor, Jira Legacy macros used to insert Jira Cloud issues will be automatically converted to Jira Work Items. Jira Legacy macros used to insert Jira Data Center issues will remain untouched.

What if the Jira Macro Repair tool is used to update links of existing Jira Legacy macros from a Jira Data Center link to a Jira Cloud link?

• Those Jira Legacy macros will automatically be converted into Jira Work Items.

Note

No customer action is required. All updates and conversions will happen automatically during the transition. The experience of Data Center sites in the Jira Legacy macro will remain the same.

[Jens Müntinga]

Hello,

Am I the only one who finds it problematic that the Jira Legacy Macro is being phased out?

The legacy macro provides a clear and readable overview of issues, whereas the Jira Work Items macro presents tickets in a contained view that requires separate scrolling within the page just to see all issues that are supposed to be displayed.

From a UX perspective, this is a serious step backwards. Having a page with its own scrollbar and an embedded macro that introduces an additional scrollbar is, in my opinion, a clear UX design anti‑pattern.

This is also the reason why the Embed Database macro is practically unusable — it follows the same concept and suffers from exactly the same issue.

Overall, this feels visually unappealing and represents a real degradation of usability for users who rely on Confluence pages to present Jira ticket overviews in a clean and readable way.

Kind regards
Jens

[Becker_ Rene]

I remember when people started saying "don't use iframes, they are ugly". 2025 / 2026, here we are again. I wonder when we will be getting Flash back (that was fun, wasn't it?).

@Jens Müntinga 

Seriously - I am with you. The implementation of the new ("smart") links and content insertion is flow breaking. It's little things like having to scroll to see the content or scrolling through the page and getting stuck in one of those iframes. Also, since it loads a new page in the BG, it slows down loading times because it has to go through the whole loading process again.

An at last ... it feels uncanny and thrown in there, like a strange object that fell onto the page but not fitting it. Atlassian, you get it done with the other Macros. Why not that one? If it is too large, have the user deal with it - they are not stupid.

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PS: Atlassian, I am with you on the inline scrolling in the spread sheet iframe, though.

[Philippe PEREZ]

Hi Atlassian.

Will you fix this problem when using Jira Work Items nested inside another bodied macro ? Some issues remain despite the fix you provided for https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-77443 

[Aleksi Leinonen]

For feature parity, please add "Allow sortable columns on the new Jira issue macro" https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-77267 to the list.

[Emma Unucic]

Hi Atlassian, I agree with Jens Müntinga it's a serious step backwards. I was using Jira Legacy in very precious pages, they're now useless because of the display limit. Would it be possible to fix that a minima ? Thanks.

[Abbigail Westerdale]

Our release notes workflow is now broken. We were using both the Jira Legacy macro and the Jira Work Items macro. The Jira Work Items macro is great for summary content but we need our descriptions and Test Steps included in our release notes that we store in our Document Management System. Having this info in our DMS means all our data related to a release is in one place, we don't need auditors in the Atlassian system, and we don't have to verify that things like this would never happen in Confluence considering this would look really bad in an audit if important information just vanished from release notes.

FYI, the macros did not auto convert to the Jira Work Items macro and when I do manually convert it, I only get 1 or 2 steps of my test steps in the exported PDF. After testing a few more old releases I can get it to show me all the vertical content but it does not force the table inside the Test Steps field to narrow up enough to fit so most the content is off the right side of the page.

What is the solution to get the full description and test case steps (custom field: Paragraph (Supports Rich Text)) exported to a PDF?

[Alan O_Keefe]

Yet another regression from Atlassian...

The workitem macro does NOT do the same thing as the jiralegacy macro and breaks our workflows!

What has happened to Atlassian, used to be an innovative company with excellent products, now it's mediocre at best!  Maybe it's time to look at alternatives!

[Laura Eng]

Hi Community,

We originally planned to complete this conversion on April 9, then updated that to April 22. We're now moving the date to May 22, 2026.

During our rollout we identified some issues that we need to address before we can proceed. We'll continue to monitor feedback. We want to make sure this conversion is a smooth experience for everyone, and we'd rather take the time to get it right.

Thank you for your patience, we appreciate it.

[Stephen Pilkington]

I agree with the comments above. This is not an improvement, and should not have been forced on users automatically. There should at least be an automatic way of converting back.

We use these filters to list all our requirements on a single Confluence page. Now it will be very easy for someone reviewing the requirements to miss them if they don't notice the scroll bar. 

In addition, the delay to May 22nd hasn't fixed simple issues like the dragging of columns (to reorder) not working every time.   An immediately obvious bug. 

There are other issue. Why is Wrap Text not applied automatically for fields such as description? Why is Key shoved on the RHS and not the first column on the LHS?

We are now going to have to spending 10s, maybe 100s of hours to fix this "improvement".  

[Bernhard G_]

I suspect that none of you at Atlassian actually use what you produce, nor do you have internal testers who know how your customers use your software, right?

Otherwise, I can't explain how you can force this new macro version on customers, a version that not only doesn't even do what its predecessor could and is missing essential standard features. How can you roll something like this out when, for example, text is simply cut off instead of wrapping lines or at least providing a horizontal scrollbar? Not to mention that the new macro simply displays additional columns like "Key," even if they were explicitly hidden before. It's completely unusable.

And the workaround is that we admins are supposed to invest tons of time manually reverting everything to the old macro until you do the next rollout, or remove the old macro entirely, or find a lot of time ourselves to find other solutions?

We pay expensive monthly fees for this, only to have to constantly invest a lot of time in workarounds because you can't even manage to provide basic functionality?
You can't be serious, right?

I wouldn't complain if this was a one-off, but unfortunately over the last years, that's becoming the norm...

[James Meyer-Bejdl]

We need to be able to export our Confluence pages including Jira items to PDF. We've just seen that all our old pages have just been "upgraded" to use the Jira Work Item macro and now nothing exports. This is the case with both the built in export to PDF (which was never very good anyway) and with a plugin that we used to get around the inadequacies of the built in export - instead of a table all we see is a URL where the table should be. This is a huge problem as it means that we are now unable to generate documentation our customers are expecting. Will this be fixed? Because this is a definite regression in functionality and one that's likely to cost us at least in terms of extra effort to find an alternative solution

[Laura Eng]

Hi Community,

Two updates:

• (1) We want to acknowledge the unexpected difficulties that have come up during this migration. I've shared a note here.
• (2) Another detail about this conversion. For pages that included a Jira legacy macro that was converted, the page history will show the following event

Automatic conversion: Legacy Jira Issue Macro to Smart Link List View

[Harald Lurger]

Dear Atlassian Team,
in our case you switchted the Legacy Jira Issue Macro to Smart Link List View "automatically" for all our spaces and all our sites, but you know from the k15t (EXP-3724) that the new "Smart Link List View" is not part of the export!

This causes two critical problems for us:

1. Column order changes
The Smart Link List View does not preserve the column order that was configured in the Legacy Jira Issue Macro. Our pages rely on a specific column arrangement for readability and compliance documentation.

2. Word export is broken (K15t Scroll Word Exporter)
We use the K15t Scroll Word Exporter to generate official release notes documentation (Word/PDF) from Confluence. The Legacy Jira Issue Macro was exported as a proper table. The Smart Link List View is exported only as a hyperlink - not as a table with issue data. This completely breaks our document generation workflow.

Why this is critical:
We produce release notes for safety-relevant industrial automation software (with the Export to word from k15t). These documents are part of our tool qualification process and must contain structured Jira issue tables (fixed problems, known problems, etc.). The broken export directly impacts our ability to deliver compliant documentation to our customers.

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And even better, there is no built-in bulk edit option to revert all of your automatic migration stuff.
Please finsih the features before you roll it out. You know since jannuary from k15t, that this fix (CONFCLOUD-77661) was too less.