Note: This feature is available only in the Enterprise Editions of PHPKB software.
An API is a service provided by an application to other external applications to exchange data. The API of PHPKB knowledge base software provides flexible and seamless integration with any of your existing software such as help desk, ticketing, and CRM software, or even chat solutions.
The API feature allows you to use PHPKB knowledge management software as a single source of knowledge that can be seemlessly connected with your external applications. With centralized knowledge base, all information is kept current and maintained at a single location while the content is transmitted to other systems through knowledge base API calls.
Why API is Required?
Integrating software systems normally takes up a significant amount of time and consequently, integration projects are often de-prioritized. This leads to development of software silos (management system that is unable to operate with any other system), resulting in a number of challenges to deal with duplicate information. However, with RESTful API of PHPKB knowledge management tool, it takes only a few seconds to set up a fully working integrated software. This not only reduces the cost but helps in better employee productivity and improved customer satisfaction.
- With non-integrated systems, employees are often unable to react immediately. The many overlapping programs do not provide a clear source of data and information, nor do they offer transparency which results in frequent mistakes, inefficient and slow work. Companies that enjoy integrated software landscapes have a major competitive advantage in the market. Employees are able to react far more quickly to customer inquiries when they have direct access to information in a ticketing system that has been integrated with the knowledge management system. They are able to efficiently give the customer the right information while in a chat session because they are able to access it directly themselves while chatting. For instance, in an integrated window that doesn’t force them to switch to a separate system to gather information on user query.
- API Integration on your websites leads to "help customers themselves". For instance, if a customer visit your contact page to raise a ticket and an API to knowledge base is set that sends retrieves the knowledge documents/suggestions corresponding to the user's query. It will allow customers to help themselves without having to wait on hold, and simple customer inquiries could be avoided. This would not only optimize user experience but also reduce non-essential requests and let your team concentrate on other important tasks.
- Get Popular Articles
- Get Recently Added Articles
- Retrieve Featured Articles
- Fetch Rated Articles
- Request Article Information
- Fetch Category Articles
- Get Article Attachments
- Search Articles
- Fetch Recent News List
- Request News Information
- Search News
- Request Category Information
- Fetch Sub-categories
- Search Categories
Which API protocol is used by PHPKB?
PHPKB uses JSON based RESTful API; Representational State Transfer (REST) or RESTful web services are one way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the internet. Representational State Transfer is an architectural style as well as an approach for communications that is often used in various web services development.
While REST can be used over nearly any protocol, it usually takes advantage of HTTP when used for Web APIs. This means that developers need not install libraries or additional software in order to take advantage of a REST API design.
When a RESTful API is called, the server will transfer to the client a representation of the state of the requested resource. For example, when a developer calls Knowledge Base API to fetch a specific article, the API will return the state of that article, including its title, creation date, attachments, categories, etc.
PHPKB knowledge management software API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks, which can be put together by your programmer. The Knowledge Management System serves documents via RESTful API, which let users search for and retrieve knowledge base documents.
How to use PHPKB API?
PHPKB offers a variety of useful commands to get information from your PHPKB installation remotely, through third-party applications. The PHPKB API operates over HTTPS and uses JSON as its data format. The API is a RESTful API and uses HTTP methods, HTTP status codes to specify requests and responses. Please see PHPKB API Reference Guide that provides details on how to use the API functions available in PHPKB knowledge base software.
API Methods Supported by PHPKB:
Articles
News
Categories
API Log Statistics
API logging helps you to troubleshoot your requests. You can search/delete log entries of a specific time period.
You can see the complete request and response message for each logged API request by clicking on the Log ID. Details such as date of request, requester IP address, result (success or failure), module name, and method along with input and response tabs is visible in Preview Log window.
