On the Twilio blog today Sylvan Ash has written up a tutorial showing how to send SMS reminders from a Symfony application as reminders of certain events.

If you have a booking system, making appointments such as massage or other therapist bookings, dental or medical appointments, etc., you’d probably like to remind the client about the booking they made on the day of the appointment. In some cases, you might also want to remind the person offering the service. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send SMS reminders to clients of their upcoming massage appointments, at a designated time before the appointment, in a Symfony project using Twilio's SMS service.

The tutorial starts with a brief description of the setup and uses Composer to create a new Symfony project (the "Appointments" application). It then moves on to the models, defining the structure for the User and Appointment entities. It also shows how to make use of the seeding functionality to create several default users. Next up comes the Twilio integration: installing the SDK via Composer, defining the configuration and adding the client as a service.

With all of that set up, the final pieces are shown: the command to send the SMS messages via the Twilio service and the cron job to run it once a day at midnight.

The Laravel News site has published a tutorial for those Laravel users out there that would like to integrate their application with Nexmo for the sending and receiving (and handling) of SMS messages in your application.

This is the first part of a series of tutorials by Michael Heap, covering how to build a multi-channel help desk system with Laravel. In this post, we’ll take a basic web based help desk system and extend it to send and receive SMS messages using the built-in Laravel notification system (which is powered by Nexmo).

The tutorial starts with some of the prerequisites you'll need to get started including a Nexmo account and the ngrok tool for exposing your site publicly while still hosting it locally. It then starts in on the functionality, using the Deskmo repository as a starting place. After a few setup steps the article has you hop over to Nexmo and purchase a number to use for the SMS and configure the application to use this number. Next it shows how to send a sample message when a ticket is created and how to receive an incoming SMS message to pull in the information and create a new ticket.

In a new post to his site Jason McCreary shows how he integrated SMS for account administration for the Laravel Shift service. It's his method of providing good support for the project from anywhere, even when he's away from his machine.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. [...] What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

He then shares the code he used to create the administration interface via SMS through the Nexmo service. He uses the information the Nexmo service sends to hiswebhook via a special number and handles it via a special endpoint on his side. In this case the interface allows him to re-run a "shift" that was previously requested if there was an error. The code is pretty simple, made up of a controller and route for the endpoint and a "FormRequest" class for the message processing.

In a previous article the SitePoint PHP blog showed you how to use Laravel, the Twilio service and some helpful packages to create an application that allowed interaction via phone calls. In this new tutorial they continue the series and update the application to allow interaction via SMS messages.

In this article, we will modify our Laravel-powered phone-capable weather forecast app so that it is accessible via SMS (text message) in addition to the voice telephone system.

They just add on the functionality rather than creating a new application for the SMS side, adding new routes, controller methods and changing up the service layer a bit. It also includes the messaging that comes back from Twilio and how the response needs to be formatted. Finally, the article shows (with screenshots included) how to configure your Twilio application to allow messaging as well as phone calls. The post ends with screenshots of the application on a mobile device sending the requests for the weather information based on the zip code provided.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial posted by author Younes Rafie showing you how to secure your Laravel application with 2FA (two-factor authentication) via SMS messages. In this example they make use of the Twilio SMS handling to send the message to the end user's device.

While everyone is concerned about their application’s security, few take it seriously and take the plunge. The first thing you’ll notice when learning about this is that two factor authentication (2FA) is the go-to solution as a first step.

Although there have been some serious problems with using text messages as a second factor, it’s definitely safer than a plain username and password combination, given that many users tend to use popular and easy to guess passwords for critical services such as payments, chat, emails, etc. In this article, we’re going to build two factor authentication into a Laravel application using Twilio SMS as the second factor.

The tutorial then starts by explaining what the end result will look like - a basic username/password login system that will require a code (from the SMS message) to continue into the account. They walk you through the creation of a new Homestead instance and installation/configuration of the new Laravel project. It then shows the updates you'll need to make to migrations and the models to handle the storage of the SMS tokens. It also shows the Blade templates to create the code entry view and error output in case of a code validation failure.

The tutorial then integrates Twilio's PHP SDK via a provider and provides a screencast of the end result.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted the latest in their (lengthy) series of tutorials showing how to use PHP to "build your startup". In this new tutorial they show how to integrate SMS functionality into the application. This is the first part covering this topic and mostly covers the setup and testing of the connection to send the necessary SMS messages.

In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the first half of my SMS configuration for the Meeting Planner application. Basically, I'll cover choosing an SMS provider, setting up the account, building the initial application infrastructure, and trial texting.

In the next episode, I'll build specific texting scenarios into the Meeting Planner application and walk you through those decisions and the coding that followed.

He starts off talking about one of the main choices you'll have to make early on: which SMS provider you want to use to send your messages. While they list several, for the sake of the tutorial they move ahead with Twilio. He show you how to set up an account with the Twilio service and where to get the credentials to connect your application to their API. After talking a bit about things like SMS pricing and handling incoming messages he starts on the integration with Yii2 via this package. Once installed and configured he creates a simple class to send a message via Twilio and tries it out with a "First test" message.

In this new tutorial on LearnComputer.com, they show you how to, using a simple call to PHP's mail function, you can send a text message to anyone.

Text messaging seems more convenient than making phone calls and creating your own PHP script to send these messages is a very easy thing to set up. Get on board with these other companies that have found how convenient text messages are for their customer and start integrating text messaging into your PHP applications. In this article, I will show you two ways to accomplish this and you will be surprised at how simple this is to do.

Once you've found the right email address for the provider, sending the message is pretty simple using mail. As an alternative, they recommend a service like TextMagic to send the messages. It's a bit more reliable and uses SMS instead of email to get your message out.

PHPMaster.com has an interesting new article posted today showing how you can use PHP to create a two-way messaging (SMS) application that can both send and initiate actions based on message content.

SMS is used for various purposes these days. For example, major websites like Gmail and Facebook use SMS to improve their authentication process with multi-factor authentication and notifying users about the updates. These are one-way SMS applications since messages are sent only from these sites to the user. Two-way SMS applications are more complex than one-way ones. In two-way SMS apps, a user can initiate a conversation by sending messages, and then the application responds according to the user’s commands.

They base the application on the Clickatell SMS service (not free, but cheap - pay by the message too) which includes the ability to hook into your API on a specific endpoint and relay the message data. The message can either be sent via a POST or GET and can easily be interpreted in your app extracting things like a timestamp, the number it came from and, of course, the actual text of the message. There's also a section about the "User Data Header" functionality that lets you easily split up a message for recombination on the remote device. Code is included for all examples.

On the Cats Who Code site today there's a new tutorial showing how to send SMS messages from your PHP application with the help of the TextMagic service.

Over the years, Short message service (SMS) has become a very important way of communication, and many businesses are looking for easy ways to send automated text messages to their customers. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can send SMS using PHP and a third party service called TextMagic. Its very easy to do!

They step you through the process - creating a TextMagic account, configuring the account with your own password and creating a simple script that includes their own API library and sends the SMS request.

In this latest post to his blog Justin Carmony looks at a system he created to hook his Nagios notifications into the Twilio web service and have it notify him via SMS with something was wrong.

In the past I would just use my iPhone's email-to-txt email address. However, when I received the txt message, it wasn't formated very pretty, and it would have a different "From Number." So if we had a crazy day, I would have 20-30 message threads in my iPhone all about Nagios. [...] What I like out this setup is with Twilio, I can buy a phone number for $1 a month. So all my notifications come through the same number.

He's included the PHP code he uses to send the notifications (using the Twillo library) and the Nagios commands he configured to send the notifications to that script via the command line.