The Twilio blog has a new post from PHP developer advocate Margaret Staples showing you how to integrate Twilio and Laravel to create a group video chat system. This makes use of the Twilio Video API to build the connections between users via a Laravel application.

While words alone are powerful, the inflections of people’s voices, the gestures and expressions we unconsciously flow through during conversation all contain a wealth of information often lost to us in our technology driven communications.

Using Twilio’s Video API you can now add the richness of face to face interactions to any web project.

Here we’ll look at how to create a Laravel web application that gives users the ability to join existing video groups or create their own. You can preview what we’re building here.

The tutorial starts with a few assumptions (things you'll need to have already set up) and a link to a GitHub repository that provides some of the boilerplate code. After a few setup commands the application should be ready to add the Twilio API/account configuration values and the addition of three routes for room joins, creates and listing. Next she creates the controller to handle the incoming requests and the views for the page output including the video and audio service provided by a Twilio script. Finally they show how to demo the result and include a few troubleshooting steps you can follow if something seems to be going wrong.

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.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by author Christopher Thomas showing you how, with the help of Twilio, create a Laravel-based application that lets users communicate with it via phone calls.

Twilio is a SaaS application which enables developers to build telephone applications using web technologies. In this two-part series, we will leverage Twilio to build a weather forecast app that is accessed using the telephone system. The backend will be written with the Laravel framework (an exploratory video course is available for purchase here, or in the form of written tutorials here).

In this part, we will create a simple program that will allow a user to call a phone number that we buy from Twilio, enter a zipcode, and receive the current weather forecast.

You'll need to have a Laravel project already set up and a development environment to work in as well as Composer installed versions of Guzzle and the Twilio SDK. With that all set up, he dives right into the code, setting up routes and creating the "Weather" service class. This class is what's used to interact with the Twilio API and respond to user prompts with weather data from the weather.gov API. Next up is the controller that provides the endpoints for Twilio to hit and return the weather data back to their waiting connection. A bit of middleware is set up to sent the Twilio request signature each time and instructions are included on how to test the local system with the public Twilio API (using Ngrok).

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.

Matt Stauffer has a quick post to his site showing how you can set up and use environment specific variables in Laravel, specifically for your testing environment.

In Laravel, it's easy to set environment variables that are specific to your testing environment. Just edit your phpunit.xml file and set them as entries in the block [...] but what if you find yourself needing to exclude these values from version control?

He talks about the project he's working on and its integration with Twilio. He need to write some tests for a class that connected to the Twilio service but wanted an easy way to swap out the production credentials with the Twilio test ones. Instead of checking in the test credentials, he dropped them into his .env settings file, one specific to the test environment.

The Twilio blog has an interesting post that lets you "tap into your inner spy" and shows you how to use their service to build a "digital decoder ring" that decodes text based on a Caesar cipher and revert it back from its encoded state, texting the results back to the user.

If you are like me you’ve probably always wanted to tap into your inner Sydney Bristow [from Alias] and become a kick-ass CIA spy. Today I’m going to show you how to use PHP, FilePreviews.io and Twilio MMS to come one step closer to that dream. We’re going to build an app that lets you snap a picture of a Caesar ciphered text, send it to a phone number and get a response with the decoded text. I

He starts with a list of things you'll need (including accounts on Twilio and FilePreviews.io) and the Twilio PHP SDK. The remainder of the post walks you through the code and pieces you'll need to make it all work:

• Analyzing Our Image
• Receiving Images Via MMS
• Cracking the Code

The end result will send the decoded information back to the caller using the rickyrobinett/CaesarCipher library sent through the Twilio service. You can get the full, working code for the example on Ricky Robinett's GitHub account.

On the Twilio blog there's a recent post showing the construction of some fundamental parts of a MMS ticketing system using Laravel and Twilio for the messaging.

Have you ever arrived at a movie, flight or concert and realized you’ve forgotten your paper ticket? Imagine how much worse it would be if you showed up at Willy Wonka’s front door, but forgot your golden ticket! To prevent an epic disaster such as this, we’re going to build an app that delivers Willy Wonka’s golden ticket directly to your phone using MMS. All the Oompa Loompas have to do is scan it. Not Willy Wonka? Don’t worry, this code should be useful for any app or company that distributes tickets. Hopefully computers are more helpful with the golden ticket than last time.

The application makes use of a few libraries outside of the Laravel framework structure to handle the various functional pieces: one for creating QR codes and another for sending the messages via Twilio. They walk through some of the basic setup for the first endpoint and the "Golden Ticket Distribution" page. He then uses the Endroid QR code library to generate a code based on a string and outputting it to the user. Using a few pieces of data from the URL (in $_GET), they define the phone number to send to and the name of the user. Finally they tie it into the Twilio messaging system and send the MMS message containing the resulting QR code.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial that helps you create a "photo tag wall" using the Twilio picture messaging functionality and some PHP. The picture messaging service lets you send and receive photos over phone numbers and short codes.

Twilio’s recently announced Picture Messaging has vastly opened up what we can do with text messaging, now we can attach photos to our text messages and have them get used in different ways. In our case, we are going to build a Photo Tag Wall, which will contain photos linked to tags that will be displayed on a website. This can be handy for events, or parties, or just about anything where you want to associate photos and tags.

They use a combination of the Jolt microframework for the structure of the app, Idiorm/Paris for the MySQL handling and the Twilio PHP library to talk to their web service. They start by setting up the database tables for both the "tag" and "photo" (SQL included). They include a sample configuration file, used by the Twilio library, and get into the actual code. The first part shows how to make the request to the API and resize the fetched data into a correctly sized photo on the server. Then they get into the routing, making both a root path and a "listener" for the Twilio API to call when a new photo it sent. Finally, they set up the actual photo wall page, pulling the image data from the database and the image from the local file system.

On the Google Developers Blog there's a new post from Keith Casey showing you how to get started with Twilio on a Google App engine, PHP-based application. It requires the use of the latest Twilio helper library, so be sure to upgrade.

I’ve wanted to explore Google App Engine for years. Between its SLA, automatic scaling, and queuing system, it has always been compelling. Unfortunately, since my Python skills are somewhere between “Hello World” and “OMG What did I just do!?” I decided to save myself the embarrassment. When Google announced PHP support for App Engine, I was both ecstatic and intrigued about what might be possible. To get something running in just a few minutes, I decided to use our Twilio PHP helper.

He walks you through the full process - setting up an App Engine account and instance, using the a href="http://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries">helper library and how you'll need to configure your routing for the files in your application.

In the latest episode of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series, Elizabeth NAramore of Engine Yard interviews Keith Casey about his role as an evangelist at Twilio.

They talk some about working at Twilio and Keith's role there, some about the Austin (Texas) technology scene that he participates in and a bit about the currently-happening TwilioCon that's running in San Francisco. There's also a mention of a conference that Elizabeth is involved in that's happening in November in Indianapolis, CodeConnexx (put on by the PHP Women group).

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. If you'd like this and more great episodes, think about subscribing to their feed.