Thanks for replying 
. The reason I was leaning towards Data Explorer was because I wanted to show some text from the first post of the topic, however I realize now this may be possible by using the topic excerpt. I tried running the Category “List Topics” query specified in the API docs but do not seem to get back an ‘excerpt’ field for the topics. But running the Data Explorer query I can see that adding ‘t.excerpt’ returns the excerpt data.
I guess my question now would be how can I get topic excerpts through the API?