From startups to Fortune 500 companies, the developer portal is at the core of any API strategy and digital transformation initiative. Currently, API Connect leads the way with our #1 ranked developer portal (Forrester) that has set the gold standard for all API management solutions on the market.But we haven’t stopped there. Today, we are thrilled to announce our biggest enhancements yet in our latest version of IBM API Connect 2018.1. Designed with simplicity, flexibility, and developer productivity in mind, here are a few highlights from what’s new out of the box in the developer portal.
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Modern UI/UX Redesign
First impressions matter. The team has worked tirelessly to completely revamp the UI/UX with a modern look and feel. We kept developer productivity in mind while redesigning the portal. .
For example, we have reduced information overload so developers will stay focused, engaged, and be able to navigate quickly regardless of their familiarity with your developer portal. Making it a first-class experience from day 1.
Easy to Learn
Part of making a truly first-class experience on day 1 is making the developer portal dead easy to use and learn. First, let’s start with the app developer. We are introducing a new subscription wizard designed to fast-track app creation and reduce friction through progressive disclosure. What does this mean for you? This helps app developers productively create more apps to innovate with your APIs and ask fewer questions, freeing up your bandwidth previously required to help them.
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For provider organizations, we are adding inline help for Portal admins to reduce the need reference documentation for unfamiliar concepts. We are also improving our documentation with detailed tutorials, guides, and more.
Portal Analytics
Introducing our overhauled Portal Analytics dashboard, now front and center in the developer portal. Empower your app developers with actionable insights with new, granular, and relevant charts they need. .
App developers will be able to do things like measuring their API usage against their current subscription plan and easily configure notifications based on the analytics data. Furthermore, our new analytic visualizations are now more performant than ever with faster loading speeds.
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Effectively Engage Your Developer Community
The ability to effectively communicate and engage with your developers both as a community and as an individual is paramount for any API strategy to succeed; thus we are excited to introduce custom email support in the developer portal. You will be able to easily brand, configure and translate your emails. As well, you will have the advanced ability to select who you want to send these emails to. They can be event or rule-based, for example, send an email two weeks after a developer has signed up or user based, for example, send an email to only subscribers of XYZ plan.
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The use cases are endless and we eliminate the need to use your own cumbersome email tools that other API management solutions make you resort to. Gone are the days of exporting users and trying to figure out how to email them in a frictionless fashion, let alone configuring custom events or rules against them.
Deployment Flexibility
API Connect 2018.1 has been completely re-architectured around microservices and containers, including the developer portal. With that, we give you the flexibility of two deployment flavors, OVA and Docker. .
The developer portal is now configurable, scalable and highly available across multiple clouds, for example, you can deploy the developer portal on public cloud and have your API manager running on a private cloud. We built this with growth in mind. You can align your deployment with your API project growth by configuring 0 to N number of developer portal clusters to meet your requirements.
Supercharged Enhancements
The new developer portal will be running the latest version of open source Drupal 8. This provides unmatched power and extensibility with an immense open source community of over 1,000,000 developers. From a customization perspective, we are making it even easier to brand and style with additional CSS classes, everywhere.
Heres what else we have done. We improved performance by significantly reducing loading times, beefed up our security to prevent malicious threats such as spam bots that are becoming more prevalent, and fully translated the portal into 12 languages to meet emerging globalization needs.
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Developer Portal 2018.1 Video Preview
[video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="http://developer.ibm.com/apiconnect/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2018/03/DevPortalOverview2018Cen.mp4"][/video]
Just Getting Started
This blog only scratches the surface of how we continue to push the needle forward for the developer portal and all API Management solutions. If you are ready to jump-start your digital strategy and want to give the developer portal a spin for yourself, visit
IBM API Connect. We have a lot more exciting enhancements in this space coming soon, stay tuned.
If you have any questions please get in touch with me. @jjrichardtang on Twitter or drop a comment below. #APIConnect#APIConnectv.2018.1#APIDevelopers#APIEconomy#developerportal#FirstLook#ProductCapabilities