According to Domain Name Industry Brief a report by VeriSign,a global leader in domain names and Internet security, there were approximately 342.4 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs)  by the third quarter of 2018, an increase of approximately 2.6 million compared to the second quarter of 2018. This means approximately 28000 domain names were registered per day, and recent projections show the numbers are expected to rise even further in 2019. The stakeholders in this sector, therefore, have to implement a number of systems to manage and automate the huge number of tasks and business processes involved. Domain name sellers, resellers, domain name managers and even individual users need to get domain name related notifications in a timely and reliable manner to efficiently manage their domains.

In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how to send domain name renewal and expiry notifications in ...

Introduction

There may be times in building your app that you will need to send an SMS to the phone number of a user. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could confirm that the number supplied is actually a cellphone? Or maybe you want to only send SMS to verified users. With Twilio's Authy API, these use cases are easy to implement. This tutorial is aimed at helping developers to build a phone number validator to verify users phone numbers in any PHP application and check if a number is a cellphone or landline before sending an SMS. 

Technical Requirements

For this tutorial, it is expected that you have basic knowledge of the following:

• Composer
• Are familiar with Laravel
• Understand PHP 5+
• Have a Twilio account

NOTE: Don’t forget to craft a Laravel project for this purpose. Here’s a link to a guide on the installation process for ...

Introduction

It’s amazing how in recent years, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has transformed how we build conversational interfaces. Notably, more businesses are building chatbots that interact with their customers in real time. In my previous tutorial, I wrote about building a chatbot using Dialogflow. In this tutorial, we’re going to build a chatbot using Twilio Autopilot and Whatsapp. Our chatbot will allow users to book an appointment and have a Google calendar event created.

This tutorial requires basic knowledge of Autopilot. If you need to read up, please do so from this guide.

Tutorial Requirements

• PHP 7 development environment
• Global installation of Composer
• Global installation of ngrok
• Twilio Account
• Google Account
• WhatsApp Account

Create a Google Project

To start off, we need to create a Google Project and enable the Google Calendar API. From your project dashboard, click on the Credentials tab. Click the create credentials dropdown button ...

What happens when developers from all over the world mix the most starred PHP framework on GitHub with the leading provider of communication APIs? You get the world’s best Laravel and Twilio communication-based apps!

Since Laracon 2019 (Laravel’s official conference) is right around the corner, we thought it would be a great idea to share our top four Laravel tutorials from our PHP community from the month of May.

Whether you’re an experienced Laravel developer or just getting your feet wet with Twilio’s PHP SDK feel free to use these awesome, start-to-finish tutorials as the platform to build your next PHP-based communication app.

Keep Everyone Informed with Text-2-Subscribe

Growing an organization comes with its challenges, but the greatest of all to overcome is probably misinformation. Regardless of size, every organization can’t afford to keep its members in the dark on news and events. This tutorial ...

Introduction

WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messaging applications used globally. It has over 450 million active users every day with an average user checking WhatsApp 23 times in a day. Modern businesses that have upheld online marketing tools in order to reach their customers have recorded tremendous growth in their sales and increased their customer base. In this tutorial, I’m going to take you through how to send WhatsApp messages with image attachments using PHP.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed in your local development environment.

1. PHP
2. Twilio Account activated with WhatsApp Sandbox Channel.
3. Twilio PHP SDK

Getting Started

In your preferred terminal, run the following commands:

The above commands create a folder named demo, in which the twilioWhatsAppMessaging.php and .env files are created inside of it. We have also ...

Introduction

One of the most appropriate ways to ensure that your application’s database contains only valid phone numbers stored against each user, is by properly verifying the phone number during the registration process. This amongst other things will ensure sanity in your application, reduce the number of false or fraudulent registrations and easily convert this data for marketing purposes.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to verify phone numbers in a Symfony 4 project by leveraging Twilio’s Verfiy API. Together we will build an application that will capture users’ phone numbers and use Twilio to send a 6 digit code through SMS. After receiving this code, the user will be required to enter it for proper verification.

Once we are done with the step-by-step process of implementing this feature, you will have learned how to structure a proper registration flow that takes phone number verification into ...

Introduction

The world has gone global and almost everyone has access to the internet every day. However, we shouldn’t leave out those without smartphones or regular PC’s. One way to cater to them is by creating SMS friendly applications, where even with the least data-capable phones, they can access our services. In this tutorial, we will use Laravel and the Twilio SMS API to make a text-to-subscribe app.

Perquisites

This tutorial assumes that the reader has a basic knowledge of PHP and Laravel. It also assumes that you have Composer set up and installed on your local system. 

Set Up A Twilio Phone Number

To create a text-to-subscribe app, we need a phone number where our users can send text messages to. When the messages are received they will call our API to trigger the actions. 

Login to your Twilio account if you already have one, or ...

In this tutorial, we'll explore how to use the Twilio SMS API to create an OpenCart module that sends an SMS when a customer places an order, registers, or has their order history modified.

OpenCart is a free open source e-commerce platform for online merchants. It provides a professional and reliable foundation from which to build a successful online store. This foundation appeals to a wide variety of users; ranging from seasoned web developers looking for a user-friendly interface to use, to shop owners just launching their business online for the first time.

Tutorial Requirements

• PHP development environment using lamp (for Linux users), xampp (for windows users) e.t.c.
• Global installation of Composer
• Twilio Account
• OpenCart Installation

OpenCart requirement and Installation

OpenCart requirements and installation can be found in the OpenCart official documentation.

Understand the OpenCart folder structure

The OpenCart is one of the great examples of MVC framework ...

Real-time updates is a feature that is becoming increasingly common in modern web applications. There are several hosted API services that provide real-time functionality to web and mobile applications and Twilio Sync is one of these services.

Sync relies on the concept of state synchronization while making use of sync objects. Sync objects are the primitives you use to make your application's state discoverable and accessible at the right granularity. There are four different object primitives each with a different use case - I won't be talking about the different primitives but this document is a good place to start.

In this tutorial, we'll look at how we can add real-time functionality to a Laravel app while making use of Message Stream sync objects.

NOTE:  Sync Message Streams let you broadcast JSON messages at a high rate to an elastic group of subscribers.

I chose Sync Message Streams due to their ...

Introduction

Laravel is one of the most famous PHP MVC frameworks with a great community. It provides all the features that are required to create your project, whether it is for personal or enterprise level usage. One feature that sets Laravel apart from other frameworks is “Laravel Queue”. For any project that needs to defer time consuming tasks, Laravel Queue offers this support out of the box.

This tutorial will help you to implement the Laravel Queue to send emails. After we’re finished, you will have a running Laravel application that allows you to send emails to registered users using Laravel queue to prevent your task from timing out and increase deliverability of your emails. We will use Sendgrid for sending emails because their service will allow us to check out whether your email is read or opened by the user.

Requirements

1. PHP development environment with Laravel
2. Composer globally ...