Very interesting

So in short the user would have to texthe MyDoman (space) 1 or "another key word to 368266?

How does it send sms? I mean can you text any number from a php script?

Using the simple example in the article, the user initiates the interaction by texting...

yourdomain hello

to DOTCOM

This assumes your domain is yourdomain.com, of course it would be your real domain name and correct channel, DOTCOM, DOTNET, etc

They would receive a text message back from your web site...

Say hello to
(1) for the World
(2) for the Universe

The user would text back...

1

to DOTCOM

The DOTGO service handles the session, so it knows that this single character text from the users phone number is in response to the message it just sent and handles the request based on the query string we provided. In this case, it would act as though the user sent the full query 'yourdomain hello world', even though they only sent 1 character.

Does that make sense?

Dave

To answer the second part of your question...

The DOTGO service receives and sends the response, they are handling all the SMS parts. We are providing the instructions to DOTGO on how to respond.

Dave

For those of us that don't live in those countries, but interact with them (and therefore SMS is an interesting topic), this 'baby steps' detail of the interaction of the user is quite useful - I'd "vote" for it to be in the main article - quite helpful, as is the main article.

I look forward to seeing additional articles on this and how to use your class for additional features - in particular, an SMS message that is sent from the server - initiated by various things {cron job, user interaction with the web page, etc.}, not an interactive that was initiated by a user.

There used to be a broadcast service where you could send an SMS message to users who subscribed. I am not sure why it went away, however it was right around the same time that twitter was gaining in popularity, coincidence?

It may still be available in the DOTGO premium package, I just don't know for sure since I have never paid to use the service.

Dave

Thanks Dave, for you hard work on this and for sharing. P.S. How can I vote for this post, for the PHP Awards?

QUESTION:
So as of now its only a response based service? Lets say I want to do 2 things.

A). I am traveling and want to build a list of followers. I ask them to text EdVizenor [email protected] to DOTCOM. (In this case yes I own EdVizenor.com

They then get a Thank you text from me. Can the script sees the vars like, $Number $Keyword?

// Examples
$Number = $_POST['Number']; // The number they texted from.
$Keyword = $_POST['MessageBody']; // Any info they sent after EdVizenor

$ThankYou = "Thank you for joining my list. Have a great day.";

// example again
replyText($ThankYou);

// My script stores info in database.
INSERT Number, Keyword INTO ... /// etc



B) One week later I want to text all of them.

// example
$Numbers[] // script to get unique numbers


$Message = "Hi, it's Ed. Just a reminder about tonights live webinar. Visting this link to register: www.EdVizenor.com";

// script to loop though all $Numbers and send $Message.


So really they are TWO separate tasks, close but unique. So can this class do something like this?

Thanks again, Dave, for the hard work you put into this!
// loop through each number and sent text to them

The short answer is, yes and no...

You are able to ask for and get information from a user, should they decide to supply it.

You are not able to initiate the interaction using this service, so you will not be able to broadcast a message to your users.

Part 3 in this series of articles is when we start getting into collecting information, so we are getting a bit ahead.

DOTGO keeps the user phone numbers private, however there is nothing stopping you from asking them to provide it or their e-mail addy and storing whatever the provide.

I think a workable approach to your scenario is to request their e-mail addy to receive notices, reminders, whatever. Then use e-mail to send the notice since we can't initiate it through DOTGO. You can always provide a keyword for them to receive additional information through text if they want to initiate the exchange, or even set up a coming events keyword that anyone can check in periodically to see what is happening.

The PHP awards would be for the PHP dotGo Engine, not these articles. If it makes it to the innovation award (I am confident it will) you will be able to vote on it anytime next month. There are a lot of really good packages being released this month, so the competition will be tight.

Dave

If you are still interested, the PHP dotGo package is in the innovation awards this month and you can submit your vote for your favorite package here...

phpclasses.org/vote.html

There are a lot of good packages this month, so the race is going to be close. Every vote will count (hint hint).

Dave