We are very excited to announce the launch of the new DocumentCloud. The new user interface has been streamlined for consistency across devices, with faster page loading, simplified application logic and modernized development practices to accelerate development and ensure high-quality, bug-free code. You can read more about our goals and motivations for the redesign in a previous edition of Release Notes. For a limited time, you can still access the old version of DocumentCloud by logging in at legacy.documentcloud.org. Please leave us feedback using the button in the upper right corner of the new site.
Today, we are also releasing a new version of the MuckRock API. Version 2 has been rewritten to provide a faster, more efficient experience for all. In preparation for an upcoming release of a new Python wrapper for the this new API, we are also releasing python-squarelet, a library that handles token management and authentication.
DocumentCloud
DocumentCloud’s all-new user interface is live for everyone. The new version is faster, more accessible and able to render documents sharper than ever. Try it out and use the “Feedback” button to tell us what you think.
Our Push to IPFS/Filecoin Add-On lets users upload documents to the IPFS/Filecoin networks for long-term preservation. In the case of users with very large projects, however, runtime and error rates become a concern, as the Add-On might not complete in time to upload the large set.
A new Add-On - the IPFS/Filecoin Batch Uploader - allows users to upload large sets of documents in scheduled batches, minimizing the risk of failures and the amount of human intervention in the large scale upload.
MuckRock Requests
MuckRock has a new version of the MuckRock API, version 2, which is rewritten from the ground up.
Instead of relying on request tokens found on your MuckRock profile page, version 2 uses the same authentication scheme as the DocumentCloud API. The use of access and refresh tokens come from MuckRock Accounts, allowing you to do initial authentication with just your username and password.
When rewriting the API, we took into account the integration of authentication to match the DocumentCloud API, performance, improved documentation, better testing and quality control.
MuckRock Accounts
We created python-squarelet, a library that handles authentication for the DocumentCloud and MuckRock APIs. It can manage the full array of request handling: authentication, automatic retries, error handling, customizable request headers and rate limiting.
Both python-documentcloud, the Python wrapper for the DocumentCloud API, and its soon-to-be sibling, python-muckrock (a wrapper for the latest MuckRock requests API), will depend on python-squarelet to handle authentication and provide a template for request handling.
