Our documentation has a new look! Here’s a quick guide for those of you who are used to the old layout:

Getting Started used to be its own section but is now a one-pager with a table of contents that covers getting started - from authorization all the way to publishing.
Profiles is now part of a larger sub-section API Reference.
Some of the larger topics such as Querying and Sorting are now part of the Core Concepts section under API Reference

Content Distribution Service (CDS)

This is the official documentation for the Content Distribution Service (CDS), NPR’s system for the validation, ingestion, and distribution of content. Released initially in 2020, CDS was built as a new foundation for distributing content to the wider NPR network that would be built into Grove, a new CMS tool and publishing platform for NPR, Member Stations and PBS.

What is CDS?

NPR’s Content Distribution Service (CDS) is a proprietary platform used to house and distribute NPR content. The CDS application programming interface (API) allows authorized users to access the CDS as long as the user agrees and adheres to the CDS API Terms of Use.

CDS provides publishers with a method to create, update, and maintain content conforming to a flexible but predictable model. It also provides retrieval clients with methods of retrieving and querying published content based on a variety of use cases.

Key concepts for those new to CDS

CDS is JSON only

The CDS uses JSON as its only way to send and retrieve data. The decision to use JSON was made due to its ease of storing and validating data in our backend.

CDS uses JSON Schema profiles

We use the JSON Schema language to define profiles. The benefit of this is that users of the API can see both the documentation for any given element in the API as well as get insight into how our backend validates a given document. See the specific profile documentation here.