Phones are everywhere! From calling to texting, you use phones for business and personal use. Twilio provides an API that lets you combine phone calls and SMS messages with your websites.
Twilio Cookbook Second Edition will get you on the fast track to learn how to use Twilio with PHP and MySQL to add phone services and SMS to your websites. You'll also quickly learn how to set up systems such as a company directory, PBX, voicemail system, and order-tracking system and how to set up two-factor authentication.
Chapter 1, Into the Frying Pan, covers what you need to know about adding two-factor authentication to a website to verify users, sets up a basic order-verification system, adds the Click-to-Call functionality to a website, records phone calls, sets up a company directory, and explains how to use Twilio Client for Text-to-Speech.
Chapter 2, Now We're Cooking, begins by covering how to create usage records, screen calls to be actually answered by a person, buying a phone number, setting up a voicemail system, and building an emergency calling system.
Chapter 3, Conducting Surveys via SMS, builds a system that lets you add subscribers, build a survey, send surveys to subscribers, and view responses that come back.
Chapter 4, Building a Conference Calling System, shows you how to build a handy conference calling system that includes scheduling, notifying attendees, recording the conference call, joining the call from a browser or a phone, monitoring the conference, and muting attendees.
Chapter 5, Combining Twilio with Other APIs, shows you how to use Twilio with other APIs to add features, such as a local business search via text messages, a movie listings search, a weather lookup, and how to search using Google.
Chapter 6, Sending and Receiving SMS Messages, digs into the many SMS messaging features that Twilio provides, beginning with sending messages from a website, replying to messages from a phone, sending bulk SMS messages to a list of people, SMS order tracking to check on orders, serving a group chat platform, and sending SMS messages from a phone call.
Chapter 7, Building a Reminder System, uses Twilio's SMS services to let you schedule reminders, get notified of reminders, retrieve a list of reminders, cancel a reminder, and add another person to a reminder.
Chapter 8, Building an IVR System, shows you how to set up an Interactive Voice Response system, beginning with a basic phone tree, screening and recording calls, logging and reporting calls, looking up contacts on incoming calls using the HighRiseHQ API, and sending SMS messages to salesforce.com contacts.
Chapter 9, Building Your Own PBX, shows you how to set up subaccounts for each of your users, let the users buy their own phone numbers, accept incoming phone calls, make outgoing calls, and delete their accounts.
Chapter 10, Digging into OpenVBX, takes you into the world of building plugins for the OpenVBX system, starting with a call log plugin, going into a searchable company directory, collecting payments over the phone using Stripe, tracking orders, setting up a caller ID system, and testing call flows.
Chapter 11, Sending and Receiving Picture Messages, shows you how to use Twilio's Picture Messaging protocol to send and receive MMS messages, including sending messages from a phone to a website, building a photo gallery and sending pictures from a website to a phone.
Chapter 12, Call Queuing, introduces you to queuing calls for agents to answer and process. This is handy for call centers.
Chapter 13, Working with Twilio Client, shows you how to build a web-based softphone to handle incoming and outgoing calls without needing to use a phone.
All you need to get started is a Twilio account; a web host; and a simple text editor, such as Notepad++, Emacs, or Vim; and an Internet connection.
This book is for programmers who have already used PHP and MySQL in one way or another. It's for people who work with a lot of backend code and want to get up to speed with the world of Twilio. It's for people who want to use the capabilities of Twilio to let their websites handle phone calls and SMS messages.
The book is for both beginners and seasoned developers, assuming that you have some experience in PHP and MySQL already, but an in-depth knowledge is not necessary.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Let's set up our listener.php file to store all incoming messages and messages.php to view messages we've received."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?php
$accountsid = ''; // YOUR TWILIO ACCOUNT SID
$authtoken = ''; // YOUR TWILIO AUTH TOKEN
$fromNumber = ''; // PHONE NUMBER CALLS WILL COME FROM
$myUrl = ''; // THE URL TO YOUR SCRIPT
$dbhost = ''; // YOUR DATABASE HOST
$dbname = ''; // YOUR DATABASE NAME
$dbuser = ''; // YOUR DATABASE USER
$dbpass = ''; // YOUR DATABASE PASS
?>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We now have a menu option under the Admin menu called Test Call Flow."
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