Experience of using the Concrete REST API

Developing with Concrete
1

We have a fairly straight forward Concrete site that houses ‘free to all’ video content.

We are now at the point where we want to add in new layer of enhanced functionality/content, accessible via user accounts only.

At this same time we also want to create native mobile Apps to largely mirror the enhanced website experience as well as add some offline-specific functionality. It would need to use the same user accounts for this purpose to ensure a smooth experience across platforms.

So - we are thinking do we stick with Concrete and use the REST API - or - Do we start again with a different system.

We’ve used Concrete for years and love it as a CMS, but have not used the REST API at all as yet. There isn’t too much documentation that I can see, or details of people’s real world experiences with it.

I wanted to find out if anyone has any useful advice/experience about using the REST API, and whether it is realistic to use it for this type of thing.

The existing site has had quite a lot of development/admin work on it to this point, we have a realistic pot to spend - but I don’t really want to start again from scratch if I can help it.

Any experience / advice / pointers would be be amazing!

Thanks all.

3

Take a gander through that, and watch the video on the home page. We’re gonna spend some time flushing out the intro content on that page from the video.

tl:dr> yes, the API was designed with exactly your needs in mind.

We manage websites for the U.S. Army where they’re creating content in Concrete CMS for websites that is then securely shared via API with mobile apps. You should absolutely be looking at Concrete for this and certainly not thinking about starting over.

3 Likes
4

Thank you @frz!

That’s good to hear that you are using it in this same way. We will start experimenting with it and see where we get to.

I did actually already watch Andrew’s video a couple of years ago - I’t s a really useful introduction.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has been using the API in the meantime - any hints and tips, etc.