Send SMS to Users From Wordpress?
July 16, 2011 3:34 PM Subscribe
What's the best way for me to send text message updates to visitors to my Wordpress site?
I'm currently redesigning the website for a college student organization I'm in, and one feature we'd really like to add is the ability for a visitor to enter their phone number on a form and receive automatic messages when we make a new post. Details:
1. We're using Wordpress, so a plugin would be ideal. I want this to be as automated as possible, but if we need to manually add people occasionally that would be okay, I suppose.
2. We're not expecting to need to send these messages to more than 30 or so people right now, but if our solution can scale to 50-100 people, that would be ideal.
3. Free is best, of course, but if there are valid reasons to use a paid service, I'm willing to explore it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm a Computer Science student so I'm comfortable with technical things, but I've never worked with SMS systems or much web stuff in general, so I definitely need a solid push in the right direction.
I'm currently redesigning the website for a college student organization I'm in, and one feature we'd really like to add is the ability for a visitor to enter their phone number on a form and receive automatic messages when we make a new post. Details:
1. We're using Wordpress, so a plugin would be ideal. I want this to be as automated as possible, but if we need to manually add people occasionally that would be okay, I suppose.
2. We're not expecting to need to send these messages to more than 30 or so people right now, but if our solution can scale to 50-100 people, that would be ideal.
3. Free is best, of course, but if there are valid reasons to use a paid service, I'm willing to explore it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm a Computer Science student so I'm comfortable with technical things, but I've never worked with SMS systems or much web stuff in general, so I definitely need a solid push in the right direction.
If you have them select their provider from a list then you can use email gateways to send SMS. If you google, there is a list of phone number <-> email address mappings, unique to each provider (that's why you have to ask.)
However, this free service is second class; the messages might be delayed or might not always make it through. If you want first class service you really have to contract with each provider individually which is a huge pain in the ass.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:03 PM on July 16, 2011
However, this free service is second class; the messages might be delayed or might not always make it through. If you want first class service you really have to contract with each provider individually which is a huge pain in the ass.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:03 PM on July 16, 2011
Tropo.com lets you write scripts that can do things like send texts. They support several scripting languages and are super easy to use. It looks like their current price is 1 cent per SMS.
posted by miyabo at 4:50 PM on July 16, 2011
posted by miyabo at 4:50 PM on July 16, 2011
I do this with Drupal with ease, there's the SMS Framework module, which I use with Clickatell
posted by Brian Puccio at 9:46 AM on July 17, 2011
posted by Brian Puccio at 9:46 AM on July 17, 2011
Sorry, post too soon. I'm sure you can look at the code there, the Clickatell API and figure something out for WordPress pretty easy.
posted by Brian Puccio at 9:46 AM on July 17, 2011
posted by Brian Puccio at 9:46 AM on July 17, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 3:41 PM on July 16, 2011