Im failing to understand how to customise the project sidebar (the left pane)

Question

Hi All,

Apologies if this is too basic as I am starting with Jira Cloud.

I am trying to understand how to customise the project sidebar.  For example when I use a Kanban template the project sidebar includes the linkes to Timeline, Calendar, Lst, Issues, ... .  When I use a Bug template the project sidebar displays a list of Default filters like All issues, My open issues, Reported by me, .... .

I would like to understand this because I enjoy learning by starting from scratch (like by using the Blank template) and then building up to something more complex (like the bug template).  Why I like this is because I may want to customise the Bug template to use new filters or even make adjustments to existing filters.  So as an example I would like to create a blank template and then set some filters according to my requirements and place them in the project sidebar.

The closest documentation I can find is https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates but this really only gives a brief overview of each of the templates.  I get the impression that this has something to do with the project type (https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/jira-applications-and-project-types-overview-938846805.html) but I am not able to confirm this.

So I guess a tldr is 'Is it possible to build the Bug tracking template (or any of the other templates) from the Blank project template'?

Also another question I have is 'Is it possible to confirm the project type that your project is' (I was not able to find this information in the Project Settings which is where I would have thought it would be)?

Thankyou

Andrew

Walter Buggenhout · Accepted Answer

Hi @andrew_klajman and welcome to the Community!

First of all: no need to apologise. We've all started from scratch at some point and it's by asking questions that you learn - we're here to help!

Second: as of today, there is not so much customisation you can do to the side bar. Most of the items you see there are not configurable today. If they are, in many cases you can toggle things on or of in project settings / features or in your board configuration (e.g. the timeline can be toggled off there for boards and the backlog can be hidden for kanban boards via the columns page, where you can also decide if you want to use an epics panel or include epic cards directly on the board as well).

With the new development of Jira views and the merge of Jira Work Management en Jira Software into a single Jira experience, Atlassian is also working on customisation options to allow you to customise the navigation to your needs. This is not yet available, but is definitely something that you can expect in the fairly near future.

With regards to the project type: in the bottom right corner of many project screens, you can see if your project is team or company managed (that is the most important thing to keep in mind). On the project settings > details page, you can see if you are in a software (JSW), business (JWM), product discovery or service project. This determines the key functionality you have available - as JWM and JSW will be merged, this will become less relevant.

Any other details (kanban, scrum, bug tracking, ...) is not so important, essentially. This tells more about the template you started from rather than what your project really is about once you start using it. Be aware that you can change almost anything in the configuration to make it fit your team's process, not matter what template you started from. I usually advise (and help) my customers to develop their own template configuration and - once that is in place - forget about the Atlassian templates from that point onwards.

Hope this helps!