what is the best practice for changing my built-in Description field from being "Rich Text" to be "Enhanced Rich Text"

Question

I am confused on how i need to appraoch my current case, to change the built-in Description field from being "Rich Text" to be "Enhanced Rich Text". now i have the following:-

1. on-premise SharePoint server 2013 and other servers are 2016.
2. i have created my custom content type which inherit from the built-in "Issue" content type.
3. Now the built-in Issue content type contain a field named "Description" with the following settings (where this field is set as Rich Text):-

4. now inside my team site, i added a new cusotm list and i set it to use the new content type.
5. now my list items will have the Description field with Rich Text capabilities.

now i need to do the following modification:-

1. i want to change my Description field to be of type "Enhanced Rich Text" instead of just "Rich Text" to allow users to add images.

now i find these 2 main approaches:-

1. I can go to the site column and chnage the column type to be "Enhanced Rich Text" and chose to apply the changes to all the list columns.

2. Or i can create a new site column named for example "Custom Description" of type "Enhanced Rich Text" and hide the built-in "Description" field.

now i would avoid approach-1 because in general modifying built-in site columns should be avoided , because these modifications might be overridden in the future if we do an upgrade or if we install commulative or public updates to our SharePoint farm. Now in appraoch-2 means extra work and also i am afraid that buit-in features might break or not work correctly if my list items have empty Description.. especially the Search service which by default will show the Description of the items inside the search results... so if i follow appraoch-2 could this mean that my list items will appear on the search result with empty description ??

so can anyone adivce on this please?

Thanks

EDIT Search result for my items will be as follow:-

where by defualt the search result will show the item Title + Description + URL .. so if i hide the built-in Description field and i add a new Custom Description field, will the new Custom description field be shown inside the search result instead of the built-in Description field ???

Answer 1

You are correct about option 1. It is not ideal to modify out-of-the-box columns, especially the ones located under the _Hidden group.

Option 2 is good. Just remove the default Description column from the content type you created and add a new column called Description. It should work to give it the same name. If it does not, then I presume you can call it Issue Description or something similar.

About Search Results

Your new Description field will be available as a managed property in the Search Centre site collection, which can be used in the search results however you want by modify the display templates used by the result type associated with your content type.

I cannot give you simple steps here on how to update the display template. You can read the following series: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/tothesharepoint/2013/08/27/how-to-change-the-way-search-results-are-displayed-in-sharepoint-server-2013/