Development Seed Blog

Building an SMS framework to integrate with Drupal

Considering the technology is 15 years old, text messaging is sadly lacking in its ability to integrate with other applications. Luckily that’s about to get easier, and it’s long overdue.

This summer Will White is developing a framework that allows sms functionality to easily integrate with Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. By the end of the summer, he’ll have created a driver-based API that works with common sms service providers and syncs with Drupal core and contributed modules. This means the hottest open source content management system will soon have the best sms integration, and everyone with a Drupal website can take advantage of it.

So far Will has researched the existing sms solutions for Drupal and has identified their strengths and weaknesses, and now he’s getting down the actual building. You can follow his progress over on the SMS Framework group on Drupal.org. If you offer sms services and want Will to consider integrating your service into Drupal, you can contact him over there.

Syncing online and sms outreach gets very interesting – and powerful. If you post events on your website, you could collect cell phone numbers in your event sign up form and then use them to send an sms blast if any event details change, such as location or a rain date. This would give you a great value-added service to give your supporters with very little investment on your part. If you have a fair trade food website that hosts recipes, you could let members text message themselves ingredient lists so they can easily take the list to the grocery store. Or if you host a political website or one that focuses on a hot issue, you could send your die hard fans sms alerts about breaking news.

Right now you can do all of this (we’ve written about some examples here and here),
but it isn’t easy or inexpensive. Will’s work on the sms framework will significantly lower these barriers – if you have a Drupal website, you’ll be able to easily use sms in all the ways described above.