Foursquare API v2, authentication, and my now-broken app

Question

I had a developer work on integrating Foursquare into my app (which makes me pretty unfamiliar with the process, but I've been educating myself). Essentially, it worked like this:

• 4sq short URL was pulled from a Twitter message
• Mechanize was used to unpack the shortened link and grab the venue_id from the full URL
• v1 of the API was queried for location info based on the venue_id from the full URL
• venue info was stored from the API

This was working fine. It seems like some things at foursquare have recently changed. First, it seems like I can't get the venue ID from the full URL anymore. Is that correct, is that a recent change?

I've been looking at v2 of the API. For those familiar with the API, does it seem like I can accomplish what I was doing before with V2 of the API without having users authorize their Foursquare account?

Any tips here would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

With V2, you will need to authenticate once and store the auth_token in a db. You can always use the auth_token for subsequent requests.