Blog: Sms

Usability, Customization Options, and Data Storage Improvements have been Committed

We’ve been improving the usability, customization options, and data storage architecture of the “SMS User module,” (which is included as part of the SMS Framework). The module allows your Drupal site to store mobile information for users that can then be used by other modules. To ensure that a user actually owns a number we use a double opt-in process where a confirmation message is sent to the handset with a four digit code. The user is then asked to enter this code to confirm ownership. Here is a screencast showing how this works.

As you can see, site administrators can now customize the text of the confirmation message using the token module. So if Obama was using Drupal to run his awesome SMS campaign, he could now have a confirmation message look like “Together we can bring change. Confirm your number at [mobile-url] with the code [confirm-code] to get locally targeted messages.”

Here are the two options hooks into the token module:

• [confirm-code] The mobile confirmation code for the user.
• [mobile-url] The URL for the user’s mobile settings page.

Here is a screenshot showing each step so you can see the new work done.

New Notification Feature for the SMS Framework

The SMS Framework project has gathered a great amount of support from the developer community. Tylor at Raincity Studios has been doing some great work with fixing up the SMS Framework project, so I thought it would be good to return to my roots to upgrade the framework and contribute an important feature. We're moving toward a 1.0 release for 5.x and ultimately upgrading to Drupal 6, so stay tuned for that. 

As I've been moving down the issue queue reviewing and applying patches, one feature stood out to me - the need to store users' mobile numbers in a separate table, instead of in $user->data. This will allow Drupal to identify the author of incoming SMS messages. With this feature, your visitors will be able to get updates about various events that occur on your site. For example, they can be alerted when new comments are made on their posts or when a 'event' node type is created. The patch includes a restructured interface for adding and confirming your mobile number. It's very similar to Twitter and Brightkite :) The Messaging Framework makes use of the API to support SMS as a send method. Add Notifications and you'll be able to alert users about updated content via SMS. I wanted to quickly show everyone how easy this is to set up.

1. Download the SMS Framework, the Messaging Framework, and the Notifications module and place them in your modules directory. (Also get Token as Notifications depends on it.)

2. Turn on the following modules:

• Messaging Framework
• SMS Messaging
• Content Notifications
• Notifications
• Notifications UI
• Token
• Email Gateway (We'll be using this for the example, but any gateway module should work.)
• SMS Framework
• SMS User

3. Go to admin/smsframework/gateways and select and configure your default gateway

4. Go to admin/notifications/settings and check 'Notify poster of own posts' for testing purposes

5. Go to admin/notifications/settings/ui and enable the desired subscription types

6. Go to user/1/notifications/nodetype and subscribe to the desired node type

7. Go to user/1/edit or user/1/mobile (depending on your SMS Framework build) and follow the steps to set up and confirm your mobile number

8. Post a node of that type and wait for your SMS message!

The SMS Framework module is still under development and is not recommended for production use.

Join Us Thursday at 2:00 pm in Barcelona or Online

Everyone who wants to integrate Drupal with an sms campaign should come to tomorrow's session SMS and Drupal. It's starting right after lunch at 2:00 pm in the Picktek room. The goal of the session is to let people know about some of the exciting things you can do with sms and about some of the great tools that already exist. There will be a live stream of the talk from the official DrupalCon website.

I'm moderating tomorrow's session and had a great meeting today with all the players to prep for it. Will White, the Summer of Coder who worked on sms integration, and his SoC mentor Ian Ward planned out a demonstration of the new sms API, while Jeff Miccolis flushed out some of his past experiences with sms campaigns to talk about, including one with Planned Parenthood. We also got to meet Chad Phillips for the first time, who was a huge help to Will this summer in getting sms to email integration working (which allows small Drupal sites to have free sms integration). Chad will end the presentiment with a demo of his work on a two-way email gateway functionality.

Everyone who was at the Google Summer of Code presentations today got to hear a short teaser of the work Will has done. Tomorrow you'll get to hear all the details and see a live demo. You can watch Will's screen capture SMS Email Gateway + Send to Phone Inline SMS Filter for Drupal if you want to get another sneak peak. 

Best DrupalCon Ever?

Over 420 members of the Drupal community were at Citilab this morning to kick off DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. Among them were eight members of the Development Seed team. After a busy and exciting summer, it's great to have a group of us here for a week of pure Drupal.

Today's sessions include an introduction to Form API 3, an in-depth look at the state of internationalization, and the Google Summer of Code Showcase. We're lucky to have several SoC students attending and we'll get to share some of the great work that we did this summer. I'll talk briefly about the SMS Framework project, but I'll go into further detail on Thursday during the SMS and Drupal session. We'll also be recording that session and posting it here on the blog.

This is an exciting year for DrupalCon. The slogan for the show is "the best DrupalCon ever." With the large number of quality sessions, the ideal location, and the number of motivated attendees, I think this will be possible.

And Our Presentations on Multilingual Drupal, SMS, and Aggregation

Greetings from Barcelona. I'm sitting above Las Ramblas in Barcelona, five stories up in a loft with a cross breeze coming off the Mediterranean. It’s a pretty nice place to sit and work, fortunately. Truthfully, I know I'll have to return to Barcelona some day to actually explore it when there's not something so distractingly exciting as a Drupal Conference, which starts in just five days. 

At DrupalCon Barcelona, which runs through next Saturday, there will be more than 80 presentations across four days. So yeah, I’m excited : ) 

I'm looking forward to many of the presentations, particularly a couple on Drupal and Facebook, as well as some geekier ones about  a new database API based on PDO in PHP 5 and CCK in 6.x and beyond.

We're putting the finishing touches on the presentations we'll give at DrupalCon, which are part of the sessions Multilingual Drupal, Aggregation and Drupal, and SMS and Drupal. 

Jose Reyero and Gabor Hojtsy will be presenting on Multilingual Drupal. They’ll talk about the many advances that have been made for Drupal 6, what's left to nail on the road map, and the current status of multilingual websites on Drupal 5 in combination with contributed modules.

For Aggregation and Drupal Aron Novak, Ken Rickard, and Alex Barth will discuss past issues with aggregation in Drupal and recent advancements in contributed modules. Aron will also talk about the new feedAPI in depth and about the opportunity to join forces around the feedAPI and what this could mean for the future of aggregation in Drupal.

Will White, along with Chad Philips and Jeff Miccolis, will present on SMS and Drupal. This presentation will focus on the SMS Framework, how it is constructed, and the contributed modules that you can use with it. Will is going to discuss some of the lessons learned during the creation of the API, as well as a bigger picture of how SMS and Drupal work well together. Chad and Jeff will share additional use cases of SMS and Drupal.

We'll record our presentations and post them to the blog next week, so if you’re not headed to Barcelona you can check them out there. And if you are going, see you soon! I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone and meeting the first time attendees. We’ll have a table set up at the conference, so stop by and say hello!

New Developments in Drupal’s SMS Framework

We’ve made some major progress recently on Drupal's new SMS Framework sponsored by Google Summer of Code. So far I've completed an SMS email gateway implementation and a filter module that introduces some interesting functionality to Drupal. I did a short demo at the July Washington DC Drupal meet-up but wanted to share the progress with everyone outside DC too.

This screencast shows what the new functionality can do.