Outbound SMS API – Video Tutorial

Welcome to Messenger Tutorials. These simple ‘show and tell’ guides will help you understand how easy it is to use our award-winning online platform Messenger.

This Tutorial is for ‘SMS API – Integrate SMS’

We’ll show you just how simple it is to integrate SMS text messaging to any application or web site.

We offer a very simple ‘HTTP post’ or ‘get API’

So, in your browser for example it’s just as simple as ‘passing in a URL’, which is the URL on our server and finally its variables like your username, your password, the message you want to send to the handset, the comma separator and some numbers you want to send the message to, the from name of your text message, be it a word up to eleven characters or a telephone number and info equals one if you want use to echo information back to your application.

So, in PHP, in just a few lines of code you’ll be up and running in minutes.

To get started you pass in your username and password which are generated when you create your textlocal account.

You also pass in, info equals one.

If you would like information returned back to your application to say whether you received the message or not.

And test equals ‘nought’ or ‘one’ to show whether we’re in test mode or not.

If we’re in test mode, messages won’t actually be delivered to handsets but will simulate this, you will se it in the reports section on the control panel.

Now we pass in the key elements of the text message.

You can gather these from either from a form submission on your web site to this PHP page, or you might decide to retrieve this information from your database and put it into these strings.

So we start with the ‘from address’. This shows whose sending the message, it can either be a word up to 11 characters or can be a number up to 14 digits.

If it’s a word people can’t reply, if it’s a number they can.

‘Selectednums’ is the comma separated list of the recipients of your text message.

This can be up to 10 thousand numbers, however we recommend keeping it to around 500 and no more, just in case there’s a break in transmission

Message is the message content itself.

You see in the example we pass in ampersand and a ?5 symbol.

This is just a test that your encoding the message correctly so PHP would use ‘urlencode’ to encode the message.

Then we simply build up the string

So you see here, data, is equal to the variables we created above.

Then using curl we assign the URL of the API on our server which is txtlocal.com forward slash send sms post dot php, and then we literally just let curl take over which sends the message out instantly

So, give it a test yourself and you should see if you receive the message in around 4 seconds.

Don’t forget within Messenger you can click on ‘help’ at any time or, of course, you can always call our friendly Support Desk

Thank you from the UK’s number One mobile messaging provider – Textlocal

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