Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By : Roger Stringer
Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By: Roger Stringer

Overview of this book

Have you ever wanted to integrate phone features into a project you were working on? Maybe you wanted to send SMS messages to your customers about the latest sales? Maybe you want to set up a company directory with voice mail? Or maybe you want to add two factor authentication to your web sites to verify your users? Since Twilio was launched in 2007, developers have had a way to do these tasks. The power of Twilio's API is huge and lets you add any type of phone solution to your web site from 2-factor authentication for verifying your users, to setting up a company directory and a voice mail system. The possibilities are endless. "Twilio Cookbook" is your Swiss army knife for Twilio development, providing you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises. It helps you take advantage of the real power of the Twilio API, and gives you a good grounding in using it in your websites. This book looks at the Twilio API, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that surrounds adding telephone functionality to your websites. As you go through the recipes, you will learn how to take advantage of the Twilio API quickly and painlessly. You will learn how to build your own IVR system, company directory, and voicemail box, and also how to set up a 2-factor authentication system to verify users, track orders via SMS, send surveys using SMS, allow users to buy phone numbers, set up and delete sub-accounts, and check to see if a human is answering a phone call. We will also combine Twilio with other APIs to build a handy local search system such as a local business search, movie listings search, and web search. If you want to take advantage of using Twilio's API to add telephone functionality to your websites, then this book is for you. "Twilio Cookbook' will leave you with a black belt in Twilio development and enable you to integrate the API into your websites.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Twilio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


One of the common requests I receive from clients is the option to send surveys via SMS. This chapter is based on the survey builders I've built for my clients.

Surveys are handy for seeing what features users want to build into a web app next, running contests, and generally gathering opinions.

In the first section, you'll have a way to let your users subscribe to your surveys. Then you'll build a survey builder that lets you view stats on sent surveys and also send new surveys. We'll include tracking here so that you can see what responses people send back and also give users the ability to unsubscribe from surveys.

Finally, we'll add some handy charting so that we can view the survey results on a nice chart.

This chapter will involve some SQL; you can find the sql file in the Chapter3/ folder.

We're also going to use a class to use PHP's PDO library for database handling. This file is called pdo.class.php and can be found in the Chapter3/ folder.

There are many ways to connect...