Expend your View Point – Add API to Your Plugins

If you are not familiar with API then here a quick definition:

API is standing for Application Programming Interface and it’s used for letting other users / developers to interact with your plugin actions and develop more products based on your plugin.

Let’s face it if you are a developer and never dealt with traffic and marketing than this will be one of the hard parts.

The one thing you know before you even start writing the first line of code is your marketing plan,  this is what will be the difference between failure and success. 

No matter if you product is the best on the market, if almost no one will hear about it, it will never takes of.

You might asking yourself wait a minute, aren’t here to talk about API?

Well the fact is that a good API not only will give your developers  an option to develop applications based on your plugin but it will also give your product a good distribution and long time.

You should never under estimated what  a good marketing plan can do for your business.

No matter weather your are developing a plugin just for your own customers or developing  plugin for you commercial usage, a good marketing plan can take you to the new level and adding an API interface to your plugin is one of the most powerful marketing strategies that will not cost almost a dime in the long run.

So how do it?

This will not be a technical post and will publish another post from the technical point of view, but you should start thinking a different way.

You should start thinking on your plugin as a product that can be expended and all you need to to do is to give other developers the tools to expand it.

Without getting into technical issues here are just few tips on designing good API:

• If you want to change the API to a  newer version always try to keep backward compatibility enough time until for giving all the developers time to change their code so it will not break.
• Document your API with many examples and details, most developers have a lot of information to learn all the time and they would prefer that the information will be served.
• Share code snippet that will save a lot of time to new developers to start and interact with your API actions.
• Don’t neglect the documentation and always keep it update all the time.
• Collect contact information of your developers, you want to notify them on changes and let them know about new releases.

Let me know what you think in the comment below and If you like this post share it.