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How to create powerful integrations with GatherContent's API

How to create powerful integrations with GatherContent's API

3 minute read

How to create powerful integrations with GatherContent's API

3 minute read

How to create powerful integrations with GatherContent's API

Robert Mills

Founder, Fourth Wall Content

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Over the past couple of weeks we’ve released a new API. This means you can now access a new set of tools which you can use to create powerful integrations with GatherContent. It's a big and exciting change that opens up the possibilities for the import and export of your content.The old API was great for getting your content out, but it didn’t allow any two-way communication between external services or platforms. It was really just built for simple export, but our new API is much more comprehensive.

It's the two-way communication that's the fundamental difference with our new API, and it has huge implications. It’s now possible to import content into GatherContent and you can interact with and manipulate any other aspect of your GatherContent projects. Workflow, statuses, templates, assignments, the list goes on, and will continue to grow.

Our REST API provides access to functionality you already use within GatherContent. Do you need to build a custom integration with other software or need to automate part of your workflow? Then our API has you covered!Andrew Cairns, Technical Lead at GatherContent.

Using our new API, you could:

  • Import content (from a CSV, Google Sheets, your CMS, or even a folder of documents)
  • Export content (to your CMS, a HTML prototype, a spreadsheet, or your favourite project management tool)
  • Apply Templates
  • Save new changes to Items
  • Manage Item Status
  • Query Accounts and Projects
  • Synchronise content
  • Build integrations with project management tools
  • Interact with other aspects with your projects, such as Templates, Workflow statuses and project structure.

In fact, some of our customers have already started making use of it.

How others are using the API

The majority of new projects that have been kicked off so far have been CMS plugins. There are currently projects on the go for Sitecore, Drupal, WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager and Expression Engine. These integrations are more powerful than they ever could have been using our old API because they can now speak back to your projects and your GatherContent account.

An example of an improved CMS integration would be to change an Item’s status to “Published” once it has been imported to your CMS.

People have also done fancy things with syncing content, manipulating Templates and exporting different fields from a GatherContent Item to several different publishing platforms. The latter is really exciting as certain fields can be sent to the CMS while others are published to social media. Creating content once and publishing everywhere.

Beyond publishing and getting rid of the friction that is so common between production and publishing, we’ve also been experimenting with tools to help get your projects started. I’m yet to meet someone that doesn’t have any content. So it makes sense for us to make it easy for you to get your content into GatherContent so it can be managed and maintained with a workflow. The solution here is import tools.

An exciting initial experiment we’ve done with our new API is to build a Google Sheets integration that imports content from a spreadsheet and uses it to populate a GatherContent project with structured content. This saves huge amounts of time when it comes to doing redesigns, audits, or getting any existing inventory of content into production.Taking the idea of import even further, we’re also looking into URL scraping and direct CMS imports of content. This is extremely exciting in terms of alleviating one of the most infamously painful steps in content production.

Much more to come

This is the tip of the ice-berg. We have a lot of other API functionality ready and waiting to be made public. Comments and due-dates being the most likely to be released soon.The thing that guarantees the constant development and exposure of this new functionality is that we actually use it ourselves. Trying to keep this post relatively non-technical (which is easier said than done when it’s got “API” in the title), we’ve moved to an ‘API-centric’ approach the development of our product. This essentially means that we use our own API as the engine of our product. So everything you can do in the product can theoretically be made possible using our API.If you would like an actual technical break-down of the API, take a look at our API documentation. Those articles do a much better job than I can of explaining how you can get started building your own tools.

Next? A publish button

The next big update with our API will be the ability to push content directly from a GatherContent Item. This will come in the form of a ‘publish’ button. This can be used to publish content to a CMS, or to trigger an infinite (I’m sure there is technically a limit somewhere) amount of other events.We'll continue to share these updates as we release them. If you have any questions about the new API right now, get in touch with us or join our free webinar where our Product Director and Technical Lead will be offering a demo of what the new API can do. You can also read a case study about how an agency in Denmark is using our API to publish product descriptions direct from GatherContent to their CMS once senior management approve them.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve released a new API. This means you can now access a new set of tools which you can use to create powerful integrations with GatherContent. It's a big and exciting change that opens up the possibilities for the import and export of your content.The old API was great for getting your content out, but it didn’t allow any two-way communication between external services or platforms. It was really just built for simple export, but our new API is much more comprehensive.

It's the two-way communication that's the fundamental difference with our new API, and it has huge implications. It’s now possible to import content into GatherContent and you can interact with and manipulate any other aspect of your GatherContent projects. Workflow, statuses, templates, assignments, the list goes on, and will continue to grow.

Our REST API provides access to functionality you already use within GatherContent. Do you need to build a custom integration with other software or need to automate part of your workflow? Then our API has you covered!Andrew Cairns, Technical Lead at GatherContent.

Using our new API, you could:

  • Import content (from a CSV, Google Sheets, your CMS, or even a folder of documents)
  • Export content (to your CMS, a HTML prototype, a spreadsheet, or your favourite project management tool)
  • Apply Templates
  • Save new changes to Items
  • Manage Item Status
  • Query Accounts and Projects
  • Synchronise content
  • Build integrations with project management tools
  • Interact with other aspects with your projects, such as Templates, Workflow statuses and project structure.

In fact, some of our customers have already started making use of it.

How others are using the API

The majority of new projects that have been kicked off so far have been CMS plugins. There are currently projects on the go for Sitecore, Drupal, WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager and Expression Engine. These integrations are more powerful than they ever could have been using our old API because they can now speak back to your projects and your GatherContent account.

An example of an improved CMS integration would be to change an Item’s status to “Published” once it has been imported to your CMS.

People have also done fancy things with syncing content, manipulating Templates and exporting different fields from a GatherContent Item to several different publishing platforms. The latter is really exciting as certain fields can be sent to the CMS while others are published to social media. Creating content once and publishing everywhere.

Beyond publishing and getting rid of the friction that is so common between production and publishing, we’ve also been experimenting with tools to help get your projects started. I’m yet to meet someone that doesn’t have any content. So it makes sense for us to make it easy for you to get your content into GatherContent so it can be managed and maintained with a workflow. The solution here is import tools.

An exciting initial experiment we’ve done with our new API is to build a Google Sheets integration that imports content from a spreadsheet and uses it to populate a GatherContent project with structured content. This saves huge amounts of time when it comes to doing redesigns, audits, or getting any existing inventory of content into production.Taking the idea of import even further, we’re also looking into URL scraping and direct CMS imports of content. This is extremely exciting in terms of alleviating one of the most infamously painful steps in content production.

Much more to come

This is the tip of the ice-berg. We have a lot of other API functionality ready and waiting to be made public. Comments and due-dates being the most likely to be released soon.The thing that guarantees the constant development and exposure of this new functionality is that we actually use it ourselves. Trying to keep this post relatively non-technical (which is easier said than done when it’s got “API” in the title), we’ve moved to an ‘API-centric’ approach the development of our product. This essentially means that we use our own API as the engine of our product. So everything you can do in the product can theoretically be made possible using our API.If you would like an actual technical break-down of the API, take a look at our API documentation. Those articles do a much better job than I can of explaining how you can get started building your own tools.

Next? A publish button

The next big update with our API will be the ability to push content directly from a GatherContent Item. This will come in the form of a ‘publish’ button. This can be used to publish content to a CMS, or to trigger an infinite (I’m sure there is technically a limit somewhere) amount of other events.We'll continue to share these updates as we release them. If you have any questions about the new API right now, get in touch with us or join our free webinar where our Product Director and Technical Lead will be offering a demo of what the new API can do. You can also read a case study about how an agency in Denmark is using our API to publish product descriptions direct from GatherContent to their CMS once senior management approve them.


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About the author

Robert Mills

Rob is Founder of Fourth Wall Content working with clients on content strategy, creation and marketing. Previously, in his role as Head of Content at GatherContent he managed all of the organisation's content output and content operations.

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