The {jiraissues} macro, part of the embedded Confluence JIRA Macros plugin, displays the filter results of JIRA query. There is some excellent assistance on configuring the macro available on the Atlassian Site here:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Troubleshooting+the+JIRA+Issues+Macro+and+Trusted+Applications

But most of those examples have more to do with Confluence/JIRA trusted connections and SSL. The problem is most all of the errors display the same result "unable to determine if sort should be enabled".

When the macro is executed the first thing it does is try and determine if sort is enabled. To do this it has to reach out to the JIRA server and ask it. If it cannot get to the JIRA server (which could be caused by several factors) then it returns this uninformative error message.

In my case I hit about every problem available but couldn't resolve the problem even after following all of the available online help. The solution was very simple - open Confluence Admin, goto General Configuration / Connection Timeouts / External Connections enabled and set the value to true.

After that I still had to sort through the Trusted App and SSL problems but there was great doc on-line on how to do that.