[Helen White]

Hi

We are interested in using CBOX for a charity organisation that tackles global health issues by setting up ‘Clusters’ which are essentially a network of people both on the ground within a community and also around the world supporting each ‘Cluster’. The website will be integral in helping members of ‘Clusters’ to communicate both within ‘Clusters’ and between ‘Clusters’. CBOX could facilitate this very well, one feature that is currently missing from CBOX that we would require is SMS Integration. The Group Email functionality is great, however, we would also like to extend this to SMS. Many of our ‘Cluster’ members will be on the ground in areas where wifi connection isn’t available, so would require updates via SMS. Has anyone tried to add this functionlity, is it something that is maybe planned in future updates and what would be implications of us adding this functionality ourselves?

We’d appreciate any thoughts or advice on this.

Thanks in advance.

[Scott Voth]

Hi Helen @helenwhite

I’m glad you are considering CBOX for your project.  I am copying @cbox_admin and @r-a-y since they did most of the work on the “reply by email” plugin.  I’m not sure of the complexity of sending SMS via the plugin – but it doesn’t seem such a stretch, since you can send text messages via email.

Ray, Boone – can you let Helen know what complexity would be involved to send SMS via a CBOX install?  Or are there any plugins that you might recommend?  Thanks!

 

 

[Ray]

Hi Helen,

It sounds like you want to add SMS integration to the existing Group Email Subscription plugin.

There are a couple of issues you would have to worry about:

1. SMS is limited to 160 characters, so if a user types more than that (which is likely in forum replies), what is the right course of action? Truncate the message?

2. SMS is generally not free to send. You’ll have to pay to reliably send SMS messages using a provider like Twilio. However, there is a free option as some mobile providers offer an email-to-SMS gateway, which allows sending an email to the user’s mobile provider (eg. YOURCELLNUMBER@mobileprovider.com) that then sends the user a SMS. But this is totally reliant on the mobile provider so if a user does not have service with a particular provider, that user would not be able to receive SMS. Here’s an email-to-SMS list that a blogger compiled listing a bunch of mobile providers that uses this feature:
http://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways/

Also read this useful comment on StackOverflow about whether email-to-SMS gateways is a good approach to use:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1179854/limitations-on-sms-messages-sent-using-free-email-sms-gateways

No one internally has brought up SMS integration before, so it’s currently not on the roadmap.

Hope that helps.

[Helen White]

Hi

Thanks very much for your comments and advice, this is very helpful. I’ll discuss this with my client and developers.

Thanks!

[Author]

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