Ideas
+1
Under review
Feature Request: API interface for Calendar system
What I would like to see is an API (like user, subscription, assets, etc) for the Calendar system.
It would allow 3rd partysoftware the ability to directly interface the calendar system from Townnews without having to resort to FTP'd files
We currently have an in-house calendar that we use for print. Currently we have to manually export each of the calendar items from the townnews hosted management system, and enter it into our system by hand. Using an exported .CSV file will work, but we would then have to create an import system for it.
- The API would allow any 3rd party program a way to interface directly, in nearly real time, with your calendar system.
- For us, this would allow us to Add/Remove/Edit entries on-the-fly without having to wait for a batched upload and download to take place. It would give a much finer control to managing the entries in the calendar without having to 'translate' them into files for processing. Also much less change of any errors creeping into the individual entries.
- For a large company such as The New York Times, it would mean faster processing, less chances of failure, and more real-time processing instead of batches.
- For Townnews it would mean a lot less proccesing power would be needed at any given time to process the batch. Spreading this load out over a longer time would reduce any bottlenecks in the work flow that might be created with a large 'batch' being processed.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Hello W!
In general, as a company, TownNews.com has moved toward using APIs in order to help integrate with third party systems, platforms and use cases. We have many existing web services, which we are always expanding. Search for "web services" on our help site to see all the different apps that have support, and what they can do. (We recently just announced, for example, full CRUD (Create Replace Update Delete) support for our editorial system.
Calendar web services support, however, is on our roadmap and we would definitely like to do this in the future. I'll let Phil, our Product Manager for Calendar, expand on this if he has more detail.
I did want to mention one thing as a possible temporary solution... I'm not sure what program you're using for print, but we do have a custom export building system. Using this, you can create custom templates that can have specialized markup in them - such as XML, HTML, style sheets, or Xtags - and then export that instead of a CSV.
Assuming your print system has some way of marking up text files in this way, it could save a lot of time.
If you want more information, you can submit a Customer Support ticket and we can provide a few examples.