Articles

A developer portal is more than just the documentation for an API. As a sort of self-service support hub, it is a key DevRel tool that helps an organization to provide the best possible developer experience for its APIs. A developer portal has a role in support, marketing, sales, and engineering. A conversation on the #documenting-apis WTD slack channel sparked the idea for this blog post.

As part of our work to make Drupal 8 the leading CMS for developer portals, we are implementing a mechanism to import the OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) specification format. This is a crucial feature not only for dedicated developer portals, but also for all Drupal sites that are exposing an API. Now that it has become much easier to create a RESTful API service in Drupal 8, the next step is to make it more straightforward to create its API reference documentation. That is why we think our work will be useful for site builders, and not just for technical writers and API product owners.

Web APIs are not just useful when making headless sites in Drupal: large Drupal sites often hold valuable information that could also be useful outside the site's context. Media companies might want to expose historical media content, community sites could show data about their community activities, e-commerce sites tend to open an API for their affiliates and partners. While it is possible to use Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 as an API backend, a lot of functionalities that describe a mature API service do not come out of the box. In this post we will explain what key concepts you have to keep in mind when designing an API service, why they are important and how APIgee Edge can make it easier to build a full-featured API webservice in Drupal successfully.

At the API days in London, I gave a presentation about developer portals. In it I shared mental models and frameworks that I think can help improve the quality of a developer portal: I decided to write 6 dedicated blog posts about what I discussed.

The main purpose of Platform Software Development Kits and Helper/Client Libraries is to accelerate and simplify development. A well maintained SDK is a trust signal that indicates the level of support and usage of your API for a language, framework, or development platform. In this post, we’ll look at how the developer portals in our research sample included SDKs.

Self-service support is arguably the most important role of a developer portal. In absence of proper documentation, API teams can spend hours on training, onboarding, and support effort. In this post we analyze the characteristics of a number of support resources and look at how they involve their users to develop information about the problem areas for an API’s use.