API documentation API documentation
The PBworks API lets you interact with your PBworks data using simple HTTP requests. There are several ways to authenticate your request. API role-based keys with reading and writing permissions for each workspace allow easy automatic fetching of posting of data. In addition, user-specific API keys let you perform actions which are attributed to particular existing users of your network or workspace.
PBworks provides a simple to use, visually appealing tool for managing content in the cloud, with sophisticated permissions and publishing options available when you want them. It's a great way for non-technical people to interact with a powerful platform for content creation and task management. Where PBworks shines is letting IT professionals take that content and route it into the rest of your workflow.
Our customers use the PBworks API for all manner of customer-facing and back-office things, and so do we. In fact, we use the API to generate the documentation you're reading right now. We use the same approach for most of the content on our public-facing website, http://pbworks.com/ — web pages, images, and videos correspond to content managed and edited on our own internal network of workspaces.
Here's how it works: We have a workspace with pages named after the sections of document you're reading. For example, right now you're reading the text of the page 'Basics'. Behind the scenes, we've run a GetPage op on that workspace with the section name as the 'page' argument. That way, we can update the documentation for our API without having to do a separate code release. For the API methods themselves, we do two things. First, if there is a page on our API documentation workspace with the same name as the op being shown, we fetch that first. Then we use the DescribeOp call to show the inputs and outputs (along with type and descriptive text for each) and finally render the available info to HTML using a standard template.
