How to post drafts from another tool

Before you start

Your Locker needs an active Pro plan, and you need to be an owner or admin. Drafts are sent with a customer API key, so either use a connection you already have or create one at Admin, then Settings, then Integrations. The article Connect another tool to your Locker covers the key itself.

Drafts use two permissions: Read post drafts, described as Read integration-created drafts, and Write post drafts, described as Create and update attributed drafts. The Content drafts preset grants both and states its own limit: publishing is not included.

Set the permissions on the key

A course restriction on the key does not narrow drafts. Restrictions apply to course, enrollment, and completion access only, so a key limited to two courses can still draft about anything. See Choose API permissions for the rest of the list.

1. 1

   Open Integrations

   Open Admin, then Settings, then Integrations, and find the form under Customer API keys.

2. 2

   Name the connection

   Enter a Connection name you will recognize later, such as the name of the tool writing the drafts.

3. 3

   Grant the two draft permissions

   Choose the Content drafts preset, or choose Custom and select Read post drafts and Write post drafts yourself.

4. 4

   Create and store the key

   Select Create key, copy the key once while it is on screen, and store it in a secret manager or an environment variable.

5. 5

   Check it

   Use Test the connection to confirm the key has the permissions you set.

What the tool can do

The connection can create drafts, update them, and delete them. Each one records the connection's identity, so your staff can see which tool wrote what when several are running at once. A key rotation keeps that identity, so last month's drafts stay attributed to the same connection after you issue a fresh key for it.

Drafts appear in the community's drafts, the same place your team already looks. Reviewing and editing happen there, by a person, exactly as they do for a draft someone typed by hand.

When to grant Publish posts

Publish posts is a separate permission, described as Publish a draft as a separate action. With it off, the tool can create drafts and cannot publish any of them. Turn it on only when you trust the source to publish without review and the volume makes checking every item impractical.

With publishing kept separate, a misconfigured filter in the connected tool produces drafts that staff can delete before any member sees them.

When a change is refused

Updates and publication use a version check. If a member of your staff opened the draft in Lockers and changed it after the integration last read it, the integration's change is turned down until it rereads the draft and works from the current text.

The version check stops a scheduled sync from overwriting an editor's changes without warning. A tool recovers by reading the draft again and reapplying its change. If a connection keeps failing on the same draft, look at whether someone is editing it in Lockers at the same time the tool runs.

Webhook events for drafts

Outbound webhooks send four draft events: Post draft created, Post draft updated, Post draft deleted, and Post published. Post events require the endpoint to be bound to a named API connection, so pick the connection in the Named API connection field when you add the endpoint. The article Receive webhooks from your Locker has the setup and the retry behavior.

For whoever builds the connection

The contract is at lockers.social/api/openapi.json, with a Postman collection at lockers.social/api/lockers-customer-api.postman_collection.json and a Node client example at lockers.social/api/examples/client.mjs. Send those to the developer or paste them into the no-code tool that is doing the writing.