In the article Add a Click To Call Button & SMS Chat to Your Joomla Site, I presented a ready-to-use extension, XT Twilio for Joomla to implement a simple communication channel on a website. The basic extension sends SMS messages (or supports a Click2Call workflow) between users and the sales area. In the second article of this series, How to Customize a Joomla Extension for SMS Chat, I presented a case to add the client name field to the extension and personalize the SMS messaging.

In this tutorial, to tackle the complexity of handling international telephone numbers properly following the E.164 standard, I’m going to introduce the integration of an advanced JavaScript plugin for entering and validating international telephone numbers, jackocnr/intl-tel-input. The plugin adds a flag dropdown to any input, detects the user's country, displays a relevant placeholder and provides formatting/validation methods. For a complete description ...

ASP.NET Core Identity is a membership system that adds login and user functionality to ASP.NET Core apps. It includes many features out of the box and has basic support for storing a phone number for a user. You can improve the robustness of ASP.NET Core’s phone number validation and provide a better user experience by integrating Twilio’s telephony features in your application.

By default the phone number in ASP.NET Core Identity is validated with a regular expression, but that's too basic to confirm whether the number is really valid, whether it includes the country dialling code, or whether it can receive SMS messages. You could implement improved validation using the library libphonenumber-csharp, as described in a previous Twilio blog post. Alternatively you could use various Twilio APIs to thoroughly validate the phone number, lookup details about the number (such as carrier or type), and ...

Introduction

Twelve years ago, Google had, in my opinion, the ambitious idea of releasing a product that would be in direct competition with Excel. Google Sheets has since gained popularity over the years and become much more than just a spreadsheet. Being an online application, it’s a lot easier to integrate it with different online tools that you use. In this tutorial, we are going to test the flexibility of Sheets by fetching data from Order Desk’s API, updating a Google Sheet and sending a Twilio confirmation via SMS. We will use Order Desk to simulate an online store fulfillment system that backs up it's data into a Google Sheet. 

Tutorial Requirements

For this tutorial, you will need:

• A PHP development environment
• A global installation of Composer
• A Twilio Account
• A Google Account
• An Order Desk Account

Setup our Development Environment

To start off, let’s create a ...

Razor Pages is a new aspect of ASP.NET Core MVC introduced in ASP.NET Core 2.0. It offers a "page-based" approach for building server-side rendered apps in ASP.NET Core and can coexist with "traditional" MVC or Web API controllers. In this post I provide an introduction to Razor Pages, the basics of getting started, and how Razor Pages differs from MVC.

Razor Pages vs MVC

If you've used ASP.NET Core for building server-side rendered apps, then you'll be familiar with the traditional Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Razor Pages provides an abstraction over the top of MVC, which can make it better suited to some page-based apps.

In MVC, controllers are used to group similar actions together. When a request is received, routing directs the request to a single action method. This method typically performs some processing, and returns an IActionResult, commonly a ViewResult or a RedirectResult. If ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital for most web applications. You can build SEO-friendly Angular apps with Angular Universal, but what about the performance and efficiency of such an application? This post will show you how to build fast Angular apps that use client and server resources efficiency while providing server-side rendering (SSR) for SEO purposes.

In this post we will:

• Create an Angular application
• Add server-side rendering with Angular Universal
• Set up an HTTP_INTERCEPTOR with a TransferState service, to prevent duplicate calls to server resources
• Create a route resolver to protect against slow external APIs.

To accomplish the tasks in this post you will need to install Node.js and npm (The Node.js installation will also install npm) as well as Angular CLI. cURL for macOS, Linux, or Windows 10 (included with build 1803 and later) and Git are referred to in the instructions but are not required ...

Introduction

As a business entity, you will always get SMS from customers seeking support, giving you feedback, filing complaints or even sending compliments. Because notifications can become overwhelming, it helps to consolidate all the SMS in one central place for easier reference.

In this tutorial, we will automatically forward SMS sent to a Twilio number to a slack channel using a webhook implemented in Laravel.

Requirements

• PHP environment
• Twilio account
• Slack account
• Ngrok
• Composer globally installed

Set Up a New Laravel Project

If you don't have one already set up, we’ll need to install a fresh Laravel application. A guide on how to set up Laravel can be found in the official Laravel documentation.

We also need to install the Twilio SDK for PHP in our project. In your terminal, navigate to the project directory and run the following command:

Getting started with Slack Incoming ...

In the article Add a Click To Call Button & SMS Chat to Your Joomla Site, I presented a ready-to-use extension, XT Twilio for Joomla to implement a simple communication channel on a website. The basic extension sends SMS messages (or supports a Click2Call workflow) between users and the sales area.

In this tutorial, I’m going to introduce how to solve a practical requirement of a real-world project; the need to add a first name field (and other fields) to the Contact by SMS module.

You will need a basic website configuration:

• Local installation of Joomla (preferably version 3.8 or superior). The full detail of CMS requirements can be found here.
• PHP 5.5 or superior. PHP 7.2 is highly recommended.
• MySQL 5.1 or superior. MySQL 5.5.3 + is recommended.
• A PHP development environment (only if you plan to develop your own extension).
• Optional: NodeJS ...

Symfony is one of the better PHP frameworks for speeding up the creation and maintenance of web applications. When coupled with Vue.js, a JavaScript framework for building user interfaces, Symfony becomes a major contender for powering sophisticated Twilio Single-Page Applications.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to set up a Symfony and Vue.js application coupled together for utilizing the Twilio API. Symfony will handle all the backend operations while Vue.js will take care of the frontend DOM rendering.

If you are building an app using the Twilio API, you will need to generate a token. At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to generate this token from our Symfony application.

Prerequisite

This tutorial uses the following:

• PHP version 7.1 or higher
• Symfony version 4.2
• Composer  (You can get the latest version)
• Vue.js version 2.x
• Node.js version ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for many Angular single-page applications (SPAs). You can build SEO-friendly Angular websites with Angular Universal, but how do you make your app SEO-friendly in every language your website supports? Google, Yandex, and Baidu, might request your pages in English, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese: how do you make your server-side rendering return the correct language?

The answer is ngx-translate, the internationalization (i18n) and localization library for Angular. This module makes it easy to use translation files that provide the correct language for both client-side and server-side rendering. This post will show you how to use it.

In this post we will:

• Create an Angular application with one component, the home page
• Add server-side rendering for SEO purposes with Angular Universal
• Set up internationalization in four languages with ngx-translate

To accomplish the tasks in this post you will need to install the following:

• Node.js and ...

Ever receive a text, probably from an old friend, but you don’t have their number saved? And you’re too embarrassed to ask, “Who is this?”.

Don’t worry. We’ve all been there. But today, we’re here to tell you that we have a solution to avoid this situations! Let's build a small Python app that uses Twilio Lookup and SMS to help you lookup phone numbers over text on the go.

The Tech Stack of Our App

Our app will use two AWS products and two Twilio APIs:

- AWS Lambda: the serverless environment which will hold our functions

- Amazon API Gateway: our API which exposes our Lambda to our Twilio number

- Lookup: to look up the phone number and see who it belongs to

- SMS: to send us a text with the phone number.

Here’s how everything will work together:

1. We’ll send a text ...