When we first imagined Coggle it was because we needed it, but quickly we realised that it would be much more broadly useful. That other people would have uses we could never imagine. So ever since the first version of our homepage we’ve avoided presenting Coggle as a tool you should use to do any one thing. Instead we aim to show you what Coggle can do, and to let you imagine how it can be useful in your own ways.
As a result, we’ve been rewarded by seeing so many ways Coggle has been used to do the things we couldn’t have imagined – and we think there are many more ways to come!
One thing it hasn’t been possible to do, until now, is to integrate Coggle with other services: to use it to visualise or explore information generated elsewhere, or to use Coggle to design and create something that is then automatically transformed. These are things we want to make possible, and that’s why we’re launching the Coggle API.
The Coggle API
The Coggle API lets programs talk to Coggle, to create, examine, and manipulate Coggle diagrams. It provides OAuth2 authentication to allow programs to request access to users’ diagrams, and then make requests on the user’s behalf using an access token.
Show me Examples!
We’ve built a couple of node.js example applications, to show just some of the things that are possible:
The Coggle Issue Importer is an application that uses both the Coggle API and the Github API to import the outstanding issues for any github project into Coggle. You can fork the project on github to explore the source code.
The Coggle OPML Importer is an API application that imports our most-asked-for import format, OPML outlines, into Coggle. The source is also available on github.
How do I get started?
If you have an idea for an application the best way to get started is by forking one of the example applications, you’ll then need to head to our developer page, to create an application ID and secret key, which your version of the app will use to talk to Coggle.
Where’s the documentation?
The API documentation is, of course, in a coggle, you can also find a link to it from our developer page:
API Client Libraries
To make talking to the API easier, we’ve written a module that does the hard work for you, currently this is only available for node.js (both of the example applications use it):
Node.js library: npm
install coggle, or check out the source code on github
Questions? Feedback!
If you have any questions or feedback about using the API just let us know at api@coggle.it, we’ve been working on a lot of new infrastructure over the last few months to support this API, and any ideas about how to make things better are welcome!