Change-notes need to be HTML for proper display in Settings > Plugins window

IntelliJ Platform
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Change notes are often stored in a separate file instead of being updated in the plugin.xml file directly. We have a CHANGELOG.md and used a file provider to add these notes to the plugin.xml during build. However, we noticed that while the notes in md format show up fine on the web site (e.g. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9212-flutter/edit/versions/stable/818757), the formatting is gone in the Settings window in IntelliJ.

We fixed this problem by converting our CHANGELOG.md to use HTML formatting in our build.gradle file, but it seems like the Settings window should handle doing this type of conversion instead, since I imagine many projects use a MD format changelog. Is there a neater way around this than adding custom code to convert MD to HTML?

Some documentation I consulted while working on this:

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Look at the intellij plugin template. Both plugin description and changelog are in markdown, and they’re converted to HTML during the build: intellij-platform-plugin-template/build.gradle.kts at main · JetBrains/intellij-platform-plugin-template · GitHub

1 Like
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Thanks! I didn’t think to just look more carefully at the template.