’’We’re moving to a web with much more user interactivity and we need a new generation of tools in DNN to support these uses’’. This is what our fans always tell us...

We all know that DNN is a content management framework whose essential purpose is to create a website of some sort. You are probably familiar with some websites including information from other websites, such as a Twitter feed or Facebook friend status. This including of other website’s information can be accomplished “the old, hard way” via scraping the page that normally shows this data, via SOAP.

But that communicating of information can be accomplished “the new, shiny RESTful way” which takes less effort and by it’s nature is universally supported.

What is REST?

It’s best that I first make sure everyone is on the same page. Web Services make it possible for external applications to interact with our application (in this case our DNN portal). These interactions are most commonly reading, creating, updating, and deleting resources.

REST is one of the most popular ways of making Web Services work. There are other formats such as SOAP or XML-RPC, but we are only going to focus on REST. REST utilizes HTTP methods, such as GET, POST and DELETE.

As an example, a popular usage of a REST interface is a mobile application that needs to read and write data from your site's database.

Blah, Blah Blah...What A Hell I'm Doing Here?!

Guys, it happened: DNN API Endpoint is here and it’s full of goodies! DNN can now finally take a REST!

This big release has been brewing for a long time and I am excited to go on the hunt in the Features to find cool bits of awesomeness. DNN API Endpoint is going to be a giant step forward for DNNizens who are having to access DNN data through an API.

DNN API Endpoint?

DNN API Endpoint was born to create an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and well-tested framework for building REST APIs to help support applications that live especially outside of DNN (mobile web, native apps, syndication, other websites, etc.). It creates URLs that when invoked will execute a configurable list of actions.

If you are wondering what in the world DNN API Endpoint is and you don’t even have the foggiest grasp of what this module can used for then you should watch the video tutorial below:

If I had to draw your attention to a few "important" highlights shipped with DNN API Endpoint, I'd encourage you to focus on:

• Create API Methods
• Builds REST APIs
• Builds Logic by Stacking Actions
• Control Output
• JSON Response
• Raw Response
• Test APIs
• Generate jQuery Code
• Access Management
• Cross-Domain Access Management
• My Tokens Integration
• Best matched with DNN API Client module
• Conditional Logic
• Easily Extensible
• Execution Context
• And dozens more

Cool isn’t it?

Not enough space to go over everything here… there are still tons of really cool features that you’ll discover once you play with it.

Wait, What’s That! You Don’t Have DNN API Endpoint Yet?

Well don’t just stand there! Go get the trial version!

Conclusion

We understand that we’ll never be able to provide all the modules and features that everyone wants. We also know we won’t be able to plan our development so perfectly to meet every need for every DNNizen.

If we admit that our DNN modules can’t help everyone then how do we stay true to our mission? How do we continue to empower our customers with the tools that can help them be more successful?

That’s where our DNN API Endpoint module becomes the solution. With our new APIs module for DNN , there is almost no limit to what you can create.

DNN API Endpoint allows other applications (such as other websites, mobile apps, etc.) to access your DNN data through an API. This means that you can create secondary applications to do any special thing you can imagine!