User-specific settings also include settings for external services. Only the CDN address is required and necessary, the others are completely optional. The aim is to select external services that provide real added value to the use of the publishing application and do not require payment from the first use.

To avoid unnecessarily taking responsibility for external services that users may have paid for separately, apikeys are primarily stored to cookies in user's browser. If user wishes to save the apikeys to a database on the server, an alternative "Save apikeys to database" button is displayed, when pressing the Ctrl key. Apikeys are only stored in one of two places, either in the database or locally as cookies, i.e. when saving them to cookies they get removed from the database and vice versa.

There are many choices to try and deploy. For a while at least, DeepL, Wordnik, ABBYY, Sceenshot Machine, Mapbox, Positionstack, Newsapi, Mediastack and others have been deployed.

Some external services are used only privately, such as translating text from one language to another, but others, such as map services, are also a bit problematic in a way, as the apikey of such services must be included in writings in which a map is used. If it is a public writing anyone can find that apikey. It is possible to overcome this problem by making additional adjustments in the user preferences of the map service, e.g. regarding the domain on which apikey can be used. Another consideration for the use of apikeys in public works is that their usage may be free only up to a certain limit. Some of these services provide real-time statistics on their use (e.g. Mapbox: Maps Loads for Web (loads), Static Tiles API (tile requests) and Temporary Geocoding API (requests).

Obtaining an SSL certificate for the publishing application instance is recommended when using these external services, as it is the policy of browsers that all cookies related to a web address are transferred to the server with each connection, meaning that with unsecured connections some data e.g. apikey can be captured by secretly monitoring the data transfer. Storing the apikey to a database instead of cookies allows them to be transferred less frequently from the server to the browser side, but still every now and then.

As the client of the publishing application will in any case have a CDN service account (required), the service from the same provider for storing and sharing files can also be enabled, which is fully optional. This requires the information "storage zone" and "storage apikey", which are created in the CDN service settings. The client of the publishing application can choose to share that information with those who have been set up a new user accounts in the admin settings of the publishing application. For more information on how to use CDN Storage, see the writing "Project files, CDN files and importing via SFTP".