Businesses expect capability to build and nurture an effective and active community of subscribers and consumers from any API management solution. As a result, the WSO2 API Manager has been designed with various community features, implemented after careful research and study of the customer needs and industry expectations.
WSO2 has identified a range of functional and non-functional requirements that directly impact the social and community aspects of the WSO2 API Manager. While some of them are still not implemented in the current version, we hope to introduce them in near-future releases, and also keep improving the already implemented community features with the changing business needs.
Described in brief detail below are prominent community features of the API Manager:
Documentation
Capability to associate comprehensive documents with an API so that API consumers get a better understanding of its use in implementing their solutions. Shown below is how documentation of a published API is visible to consumers through the API Store.
All documents have unique URLs to help better SEO support.
For more information on various types of documents, how to add and maintain them, refer to section Adding API Documentation.
Rating and Commenting
Consumers can rate APIs per version and comment on them, which can be used as a guideline on its quality and usefulness by potential subscribers. Commenting and rating help create a community around a particular API. Comments appear sorted by the time it was entered, alongside the author's name. Commenting is similar to a forum for subscribers, who can discuss common issues/features pertaining to a given API version.
Shown below is how comments/rates of a published API is visible to subscribers through the API Store.
Searching
Before subscribing to an API, potential users can search for an API. Although, currently search is only supported by API name, we will facilitate more search options in the next release.
Tagging
When adding an API through the API Publisher, providers can include meaningful tags to an API. Tags allow API providers to group/categorize APIs having similar attributes/behavior/domain. Once a tagged API gets published to the API Store, its tags will appear as clickable links to the API consumers, who can use them to quickly jump to the APIs they are interested in.
Shown below is how tags are visible to subscribers through the API Store.
