I have been asked to design a website for a client but one of the requirements is that there is a form which includes such things as name, email, dob and mobile number once the user submits the form a SMS is automatically sent to the users mobile almost like a autoresponder.
How to achieve this?
This can be done using an external SMS gateway which will not be free, but also not awfully expensive.
However, you say you are not a programmer. For this to be built well and most important of all, safely, it might be a good idea to use the services of one.
If you want to do it yourself, consider using a pre-paid plan with the SMS provider of your choice so you can't be ruined by a bot flooding your form with thousands of requests.
Web sms functionality can be added to any web application or website. As #Pekka said you need to use an external SMS gateway and to connect your application to this SMS Gateway. Most SMS gateways provide external API which can be used to do that. They usually have documentation which you can use to find out how to integrate SMS notification in your PHP code. Unfortunately there are no reliable free sms service provides so you have to pay for this sms service. You can check http://www.phpjabbers.com/web-sms/ which seems to work a lot easy. Their integration code is pretty simple:
<?php
$SMSLIB["phone"] = '44111222333'; // your phone number
$SMSLIB["key"] = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrs'; // your personal API code
include("smslib.php"); // we will provide you with smslib.php file
sendSMS("test message", $SMSLIB["phone"]); // function which sends the message
?>
The easiest way to do this is to send it to their mobile numbers assigned email address (which is different by each carrier) then have it sent like a normal email.
The only issue is you will probably have to have a Dropbox with each carrier then add something to the PHP that changes the email address (ex. $tmobile would be tmomail.net).
More info:
How To Send Email To Any Cell Phone (for Free)
Most of mobile carriers offer free Email To SMS gateways which can be used to forward simple text emails to a mobile phones. And the good news, majority of those gateways are free and available to the general public.
Related
I want to develop a website that sends and receives messages to a huge number of mobile phones in different country. The system is developed using PHP, My question is that: What requirements(i.e configuration in php) are needed from the carrier that messages are sending and receiving via it? How many numbers are needed for this purpose if the distinction numbers are too many? Is bulk id can be used for one number to send sms for a large numbers?
You need to get an account with SMS gateway providers. SMS gateway sits between your website and the mobile network's short message service center and sends/receives SMS. This is the easy way to do this becuase these gateways can proveide choices of protocals such as HTTP, SMTP, SMPP and Web services.
There will probably be cost involved with using these gateways and number (bulk) of SMS you can send depends on the kind of account you have with these gateways.
Few exampls of such gateways are Twilio, Clickatell, bulksms etc.
I've recently made a food ecommerce based website in PHP. I've included online ordering and I'll be manually attending to orders instantly. So I need to receive a notification on one or more mobiles/emails/any other way so that one of us can instantly confirm and deliver the order. How should I go about it? What gateways are present for this kind of job? I'm willing to shell out a certain amount of money for such a service.
Thanks!!
You can use this service
http://html.mobily.ws/English/Solutions/Developers/PHPSMS.html
Example included.. It will cost you 15$ for 500 SMS.
Here are a few paid SMS APIs:
Nexmo
Twilio
Tropo
Pricing for all is from 1 cent to 2 cents per message. Nexmo (as far as I know), is the only SMS provider to publish quality of delivery rates, so you can see how well messages are delivered to the specific networks you'll be using (DLR rate is the important rate).
Here are a few paid email APIs:
SendGrid
Postmark
Mailgun
All three allow both sending and * receiving* email through the API (similar to how the above SMS APIs work), meaning you could easily support email and SMS side by side. Also, parsing incoming email is painful to do manually, so if you're considering allowing a reply to take some action on the order, that will make it easy.
Pricing for all varies, but it's pretty inexpensive across the board.
Disclaimer, I do developer evangelism part time at Nexmo.
I have a website where people will book for Site visits.The Support Executive Confirms Site visit in the previous day. Once the Site visit is confirmed on the day on which site visit should happen the customer should receive SMS in morning telling that you have site visit today as requested.
I have Third party SMS Service
Now I Should Run a Code in PHP, MySQL which sends a SMS in the morning on which the site visit should happen
How can I Do that
Cron -> starts PHP-Script , PHP Script reads records from the SQL Table and checks if an SMS has to be sent, i assume its sms over mail, so you can use the integrated php function to send out mails to the sms gateway. For the guy confirming the visits, create another site with proper authentication where he can access the table and agree with the site-visits and anotherone for the customer to register for site visits
You need a cron job set to run in morning which will call your php file have code for looking in database for customers you need to send sms to.
Yo need to register to sum sms gateway provide 2 good one i know is clickatell and eztexting.
You can get there api for sending sms in there website.
Happy Smsing :D
Set a Cron Jobs in your Control panel.Try this link
http://www.devx.com/DevX/Article/39900/1954
If you would like to try an entirely different approach, check out:
Sent.ly - http://sent.ly
I am the founder of Sent.ly and thought maybe Sent.ly could help you out...
Sent.ly allows you to use an Android phone as an SMS gateway. So... you could just purchase a cheap Android phone ($150 or so) and set up Sent.ly on it and put a SIM in the phone.
By calling the Sent.ly API, the SMS would go out through the SIM in your Android phone. Sent.ly also has the option for scheduling an SMS for sending later which is your use case.
This also allows your PHP application to RECEIVE SMS in addition to just sending it out.
You can setup rules and if an incoming message matches a rule, it would be posted to a PHP page of your choice.
Since I am a great fan of stackoverflow, I would like to invite you to try Sent.ly. We would be happy to set you up with extra credits if you like. Just mail us at support#sent.ly
Cheers,
Varun
I have developed a system like this for use with some of my clients, and you can easily use it to integrate with your website or applications, through HTTP POST or WebServices (using PHP, C# or whatever).
If you are interested just leave an email or other contact information as a reply to this answer and I will gladly send you a sample code of how to send SMS, setting the desired time for sending messages, beyond other things, through our system.
You will not need to have any kind of cron knowledge and setup, it is all handled by our system, and the code is pretty simple and straight forward. You will only need to call our services upon site visit confirmation, setting the desired message sending time, and our system will do the rest.
Best regards.
I've been searching for a few hours on the best way to add sms notifications and reception to my PHP website. It seems that it's easy to send texts (to an email forward to a phone), but hard to receive them without an SMS gateway. Clickatell was recommended a lot.
But: I stumbled across a few article recommending Google Voice as a channel to send and receive SMS. (Here's one post: http://sudocode.net/article/190/receiving-incoming-smstext-messages-from-google-voice-in-php/)
Is there any reason I shouldn't/can't use a Google Voice number (and PHP) to handle my sms outbound and inbound messages?
I would check the Google Voice terms of service. If this is a commercial venture, I believe that's prohibited. Also since there is no official API, things could change at any time and break your app.
If you need reliable incoming or outgoing SMS there is no substitute for a gateway. I would recommend one, but I am not an impartial observer (see profile).
There is no official PHP API for Google Voice, however I used GVmax along with this PHP-SDK to create a website called Memebro.
I've seen many examples of this (clickatell.com among them) that only support text in the USA. I need my application to receive images/videos from text messages (MMS?) from users. The web app needs to receive a way to identify the user (phone number) and the actual files (in the same fashion facebook has implemented for sharing photos via phone). Any ideas on how I can accomplish this? Would it be better to just create an app for iPhone and Android instead?
Location: United States (East Coast)
There may (or likely is) some MMS gateway that will allow your app to appear as another phone number (or short code), but I'm pretty sure you can just have people send the MMS message to an e-mail address. I believe that's standard (as in all carriers support it).
You'll just have to parse the sender's e-mail to find the phone number, and grab the attachment to find the file. You may need to 'detect' the correct attachment as some carriers add branding elements to the email.
Updated: From Wikipedia, it seems MMS to email gateways are 'common', but I guess not required.
E-mail and web-based gateways to the MMS (and SMS) system are common. On the reception side, the content servers can typically receive service requests both from WAP and normal HTTP browsers, so delivery via the web is simple. For sending from external sources to handsets, most carriers allow MIME encoded message to be sent to the receiver's phone number with a special domain.
So if your app needs to be completely accessible to everyone, this solution may not work. It is worth mentioning that popular file sharing site drop.io just uses an e-mail address for its MMS send/receive.
It's perfectly possible if you setup your own WAP gateway - usually this requires integration with the service providers - and they'll probably only be interested in talking to you if you'll be processing large volumes of messages (>10000 per day). If this does describe you, then you might want to have a look at Kannel.
For very small volumes, then you could achieve this with just a mobile phone and, again, Kannel. See the Kannel docs for supported devices.
If your volumes are somewhere in between, then you should probably be talking to a service aggregator (like clickatell) - sorry but I don't know whom provides such a service in the US.
HTH
C.