Preface

Phones are everywhere! From calling to texting, you use phones for your business and for personal use. Twilio provides an API that lets you combine phone calls and SMS messages with your websites.

Twilio Cookbook will get you on the fast lane to learning how to use Twilio with PHP and MySQL to add phone and SMS services to your websites; you'll also rapidly learn how to set up systems such as a company directory, PBX, a voicemail system, an order-tracking system, and finally how to set up two-factor authentication.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Into the Frying Pan, covers what you need to know about adding two-factor authentication to a website to verify users. This chapter helps you set up a basic order-verification system, add the Click-to-Call functionality to a website, and record phone calls. We will also set up a company directory and learn how to use Twilio Client for Text-to-Speech.

Chapter 2, Now We're Cooking, begins by covering how to create usage records and then proceeds to topics such as 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 from 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, and a weather look-up. You'll also learn how to search 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 to 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 notifications of the reminders set, 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 www.Salesforce.com contacts.

Chapter 9, Building Your Own PBX, shows you how to set up subaccounts for each of your users, letting them buy their own phone numbers, accept incoming phone calls, make outgoing phone 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.

What you need for this book

All you need to get started is a Twilio account, a web host, a simple text editor such as Notepad++, Emacs, or Vim, and an Internet connection.

Who this book is for

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 and assumes that you have some experience in PHP and MySQL already. In-depth knowledge of these applications is not necessary, however.

Conventions

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: "Create a file called search.php in your views folder."

A block of code is set as follows:

<h3>Choose a Twilio number to buy</h3>
<?php   foreach($numbers->available_phone_numbers as $number){ ?>
  <form method="POST" action="<?=$uri?>/buy">
  <label><?php echo $number->friendly_name ?></label>
  <input type="hidden" name="PhoneNumber" value="<?php echo $number->phone_number ?>">
  <input type="hidden" name="action" value="buy" />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="BUY" />
  </form>
<?php   }  ?>

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."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Downloading the example code

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Questions

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