Send SMS text messages from your web site, part 1

Publication: APC Magazine
Issue: Volume 28, Number 6, June 2008

This 2 part series was co-authored by 2 of my students and the article consolidates one of the assignment tasks in the COMP306 unit that I taught at ACU. We discuss SMS gateway providers, PHP coding, authentication, and sending text messages from a web site. The magazine is available in newsagents in Australia and New Zealand.

Enabling you site visitors to send SMS messages from your site can be particularly useful. In this tutorial we’ll cover the main steps involved in programming the function into the site using PHP. We’ll discuss the need for an SMS gateway provider and the initial step we took in sending our first text message. From there we’ll move onto building a basic web site where we’ll be able to enter a message and the recipient’s mobile number. Once that is done we’ll look towards using PHP to help with the remaining steps, including authenticating ourselves with the gateway provider, processing our web form and sending the text message.