JIRA Admin Ninja Training

JIRA Administration Ninja Guide

Managing a JIRA instance? This is the guide for you. All of these tasks require admin priviledges and will help you learn how to customize JIRA to suit your team's needs. If you master all of them, you will be the JIRA sensei of your organization.

The first step on your way to admin aptitude is the white belt. To receive your white belt, you must learn to:

  • Change the Site Logo
  • Modify the Announcement Banner
  • Customize the System Dashboard

Once you've settled into your JIRA instance, you may want to customize its look and feel a bit. In addition to setting the logo that appears at the top of every page in JIRA, you can also configure many of the colors that you see in JIRA.

How to do it:

  1. Click the 'Administration' tab in JIRA's top navigation bar.
  2. Click the 'Look and Feel' link under the 'System' section of the Admin page.
  3. Click the 'Edit Configuration' link at the bottom of the page to begin editing the color scheme, logo, date/time format options, and more.

To learn more, see the documentation.

Modify the Announcement Banner

As an administrator, if you have a message you'd like everyone in the instance to see, you can put it in JIRA's announcement banner. You can also use this space to insert HTML, Javascript or CSS into each page in JIRA.

How to do it:

  1. Click the 'Administration' tab in JIRA's top navigation bar.
  2. Click the 'Announcement Banner' link under the 'System' section of the Administration page.
  3. Input the HTML, Javascript or CSS you'd like to appear in the JIRA header.
  4. Select if you'd like the message to be public and appear to anonymous users, or private and only appear to users that are logged in.

For more information on the announcement banner, check out the documentation.

Customize the System Dashboard

The System Dashboard is the first thing a new user sees when they log into JIRA. You can customize what they see to maximize the effect of this first impression.

How to do it:

  1. Click on the 'Administration' button at the top right of any page. Then click on 'System Dashboard' in the list of 'System' configurations.
  2. From this page, you can edit the layout to change the number of columns and add/edit/move/delete gadgets.
  3. To add another gadget to the dashboard, click 'Add Gadget' then pick from the available gadgets. When you have added all of the gadgets you want, click 'Finished' and configure each of the new gadgets.

For more info, check out the documentation.