Mass SMS Program - twilio

Question

I am working on a program where I will text a message to my Twilio number and have it send the message out to a group of people. I want the numbers to read from either a SQL database (so that people can sign up on a website via PHP) or through a Google Sheets spreadsheet. I really don't know where to start and was wondering if I could get some input from the pros.
Thank you!
Anthony

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.
If what you're looking for is using Google Spreadsheets, we actually have a pretty comprehensive tutorial on how to use Google Spreadsheets with PHP here.
But the gist is the following:
Enable your spreadsheet for programmatic access
Start reading the data from it and loop through your records.
Looping through your records can be as easy as this:
// Get our spreadsheet
$spreadsheet = (new Google\Spreadsheet\SpreadsheetService)
->getSpreadsheetFeed()
->getByTitle('Phone Numbers');
// Get the first worksheet (tab)
$worksheets = $spreadsheet->getWorksheetFeed()->getEntries();
$worksheet = $worksheets[0];
$listFeed = $worksheet->getListFeed();
/** #var ListEntry */
foreach ($listFeed->getEntries() as $entry) {
$phone = $entry->getValues();
}
On the loop above, you could also use the Twilio REST api to start sending SMS messages with Twilio as follows:
$sms = $client->account->messages->create(
// the number we are sending to - Any phone number
$phone,
array(
// Step 6: Change the 'From' number below to be a valid Twilio number
// that you've purchased
'from' => "YOUR_NUMBER",
// the sms body
'body' => "Hey $name, Monkey Party at 6PM. Bring Bananas!"
)
);
So it's just a matter of using the two together. you can read more about sending messages with PHP here.
Hope this helps you out