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Documentation Suggestions #1448

@abidlen

Description

@abidlen

Affected Product
API

Describe the bug
I have a few suggestions to improve the documentation from the perspective of someone that is fairly new to Planning Center and also to using API's.
The documentation was clear in helping me determine that a PAT was the right choice for me. However I struggled more than I should have in getting authentication correct.
The initial problem was the Grok led me down the road of Bearer Token vs Basic Auth (which the documentation does clearly call out) but the reason that I didn't fully "trust" that the documentation was accurate is that it felt like the docs were a copy/paste of the Oauth section, and hadn't fully been customized to PAT.
My specific suggestions for improvement to the README are:

  • Where the doc says You can get 'Personal Access Tokens' here... it links to "My Developer Applications" instead of "Personal Access Tokens". It would feel tighter if it linked to the correct spot.
  • The curl example uses "application_id" instead of "client_id". Client ID is what is displayed when creating a PAT and would thus feel more consistent if it was used in the example.

These notes apply generally both to the README on github and the Authentication section in the documentation.

Summarily:
The docs are crystal clear that Basic Auth is the right choice. However approaching this from the perspective of my lack of experience and Grok telling me to use Bearer token, it took me longer than I want to admit to put the pieces together and successfully authenticate.
Cheers

I have..

  • Reviewed the documentation found at https://developer.planning.center/docs
  • Searched for previous issues reporting this bug
  • Removed all private information from this issue (credentials, tokens, emails, phone numbers, etc.)
  • Reviewed my issue for completeness

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