API

Descartes once wrote, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” He meant that his philosophical advancements were made possible by the progress of those before him. The same is true in software development. No product is built in abstraction. We learn and build and make progress on top of work shared by others. Public APIs are essential to this ecosystem. Many of us learned to code by tinkering with public APIs and Padlet itself relies heavily on APIs. We want to contribute to this environment. We are releasing an API of our own.

An API has been one of our most requested features and we’re relieved to finally launch it.

What’s offered by the API

V1 of our API will provide two endpoints. One to add posts and one to retrieve padlet content. We chose only these two endpoints to maintain simplicity and to support the most commonly requested use cases.

• The 'Create a post' endpoint will allow you to send posts to your padlet. You will be able to send attachments as links. We are working on a direct upload for future versions.
• The 'Get board by ID' endpoint will allow you to retrieve all padlet data. You’ll get post data with links to attachments that can be used directly in your application. You can also get the wallpaper, title, subtitle, and section data.

A simple and useable API

We understand that APIs can be hard to get started with. We’ve tried our best to make sure our API is easy to use for any developer with any level of experience.

Every padlet contains an API panel with everything you’ll need to make calls on that particular padlet. We’ve also created a developer portal with straightforward documentation and additional information on error messages and rate limiting.

Who can use the API

You can use the API if you are, 1.) a paid user and 2.) an admin or creator of the padlet you want to use the API for.

Get started with the API

You can find the developer portal with documentation here. You can join a Discord server to ask questions and share ideas here.

Demo app built with the API

If you were hoping to be the first developer to build an app with our API, we’re sorry to disappoint you. We’ve already built an app that converts padlets into flashcards.

You can check out the flashcard app here. You can access the GitHub repository here.

API rules and future plans

We currently have no rules about what you can do with the API,  but we reserve the right to restrict access if we catch you acting nefarious with it.

This is an early version. While we are excited to share it with you, we also know that we can do more. If you want anything specific from the API, make sure to let us know @padlet on Twitter and on the Discord server.