We’re pleased to announce the beta release of the Dribbble v1 API. It’s the culmination of a lot of thought and hard work. Hoots and salutes to Tristan Dunn for implementing this functionality and making it available to our community.
The v1 API contains a large set of endpoints covering most common read operations and supports authentication via OAuth, enabling long-awaited endpoints for writes. We know you can’t wait to like and comment from your preferred mobile application. Or to easily upload a new shot without having to open a browser. And we’re excited to see new applications that never occurred to us.
Some of you may be asking, “Didn’t you already have beta API a long time ago?” Indeed we did—you can find the now-deprecated original API here. However, development on that version stalled and we never added much-requested support for write operations.
We released the original API with a lot of enthusiasum but not much of a plan. Unfortunately, supporting it while trying to grow a community, scale to meet our traffic, implement new features and establish revenue streams with only a two-person, one-developer team became a burden. As a bootstrapped startup with a mission to grow via earned, sustainable revenue, we learned some lessons.
While we’re still a small organization, we’ve grown our developer team to four strong, enjoy the benefit of some hard-won knowledge, and have a much stronger identity as a business.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. In order to expand our API offering, it’s crucial for us to establish boundaries for its use. Here are the broad strokes:
- Please don’t use the API to build a similar or alternate version of the dribbble.com website or community.
- Please don’t use the API to build a competing service to our revenue-generating offerings such as Jobs and Find Designers.
The Dribbble API Terms & Guidelines may always be a work in progress, but we’ve tried as best we can to spell out where we’re headed and what uses of our data we reserve for ourselves. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to build with our API. If you still have questions after reading, please contact us.
With greater resources, a clearer vision, and a comprehensive set of guidelines, we’re excited to revisit the API with a much broader offering and watch what the community builds. We’re also happy to have an avenue for developers to participate and interact with our community of designers. And, unlike last time, we hope to mark v1 as a stable release soon, once the tires have been kicked and the bugs resolved.
If you’re planning to give it a spin, be sure to follow @dribbbleapi for updates and contact us if you have any issues or questions. We’d also love to hear about any libraries or projects you’ve made—seeing the API get used is the most exciting part of releasing it.
One final note: So as not to disrupt existing applications that use the now-deprecated original API, it will continue to be available until April 8, 2015 at which point it will be retired. Please migrate any existing applications to the v1 API by this date.
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