(Re-)Introduction to Atom

Most bloggers who use Movable Type and TypePad know them as publishing tools. And most developers know Movable Type can be extended through plugins or by customizing templates. But there's another way to look at both platforms, and that's as a collection of web services for developers to use.

Fortunately, doing so is a fairly straightforward matter. Both TypePad and Movable Type are AtomEnabled, meaning they can use the Atom syndication format for output and the Atom API for entering information into the system. This Atom support is in addition to the existing support that both tools have for the XML-RPC API and the RSS syndication format, both of which are still fully supported.

We'll be looking more at Atom support over the next few days, but it makes sense to start with the basics of the Atom API. To familiarize yourself, you'll want to read the TypePad Atom API documentation. Though they're not in their final version yet, they provide a solid overview of what's available. And since versoin 3.0, Movable Type offers the same Atom support, except for Photo Albums and TypeLists which only exist in TypePad. Ben Hammersley's done a good job of documenting this support.

Once you've read over the documentation as well as the latest IETF draft (that one's a little bit tougher to read), you might want to start thinking of how you can use Movable Type and TypePad as a collection of publishing-related web services available through a common API. Check in this week as we'll look at some ways to make that work easier and more automatic.