SMS Alert WordPress Plugin idea

Update: You can now download this WordPress SMS plugin.

If you thinking free SMS stop right there. Here’s an idea to send SMS alerts via WordPress to users who have subscribed using their mobile phone numbers on your WordPress blog.

Has this SMS Text Message WordPress plugin been done before you might be thinking. Well yes and no. Michael Torbert has created a plugin for WordPress called SMS Text Message that…

Allows a reader to submit their phone number through a sidebar widget. The blog owner then can periodically send alerts, updates, etc via SMS to everyone at once.

Here are some of the features.

includes built-in widget
easy, simple administrative management interface
support for all the major wireless carriers

Unfortunately the SMS WordPress plugin that already exists does not support all major wireless carriers and only supports US carriers. The majority of wordpress users who might even need this service will most likely be outside the iPhone toting US of A. They’ll probably be in the devleoping wwworld where Nokia/Symbian rules.

How would one go about improving the WordPress SMS plugin to support the majority of mobile networks throughout the world? You could use a SMS gateway API that covers over 220 countries
and nearly 900 different mobile networks.

Built-in SMS Subscribe/Unsubscribe Widget or Code Snippet.
This is a feature that must be included with the new and improved WordPress SMS Alert plugin. Iy will allow users to easily subscribe to SMS alerts from your blog’s sidebar or any post or page on your wordpress blog with a simple code snippet like .

SMS Administrative Management Interface
So when a blog owner is logged into their wordpress blog they can easily do the following:

Enter API credentials that enable the blog owner to send SMS messages to the people who have subscribed via the SMS alert widget. The subscribers will receive the SMS for free or at normal carrier rates but the blog owner will pay for the sending of the SMS.
Quickly send an SMS alert to all subscribers from the WordPress administration area when logged in or if you update your blog infrequently, send an alert every time you wirte a new article on your blog (this could become expensive to the blog owner or irritating end user. This all depends on the blog so allowing both options would be ideal. there should definitely be an option to toggle the post to SMS feature on or off. Default should be off.
View the subscriber count in order to budget your SMS Alert sending costs

An example of how Your Web AddiCT would use this WordPress plugin is to allow you to subscribe to competition alerts for when there will be another mobile phone give away. Would you find this WordPress SMS plugin useful or does a SMS plugin like this already exist? Let me know in the comments.

Update: You can now download this WordPress SMS plugin.

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19 Responses to "SMS Alert WordPress Plugin idea"

Pawel says:

30 June 2010 at 12:35

Good idea. Now to build something…

Reply
1. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  30 June 2010 at 12:45
  
  Any Takers?
  
  Reply
2. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  1 July 2010 at 14:31
  
  it’s been built 🙂 have a look on the blog here https://rafiqp.sg-host.com
  
  Reply
Foxinni says:

30 June 2010 at 12:36

Not a bad idea. 🙂 The SMS gateway is key.

Reply
Johan Jacobs says:

30 June 2010 at 12:57

This is quite easy to do. I’m busy with a WordPress project at the moment, will see, maybe get around to put something togeter.

Reply
1. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  30 June 2010 at 13:05
  
  cool @F2006 would be great if you do, I’d be the first to use it 🙂
  
  Reply
2. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  1 July 2010 at 14:31
  
  its been built have a look…
  
  Reply
Charl van Niekerk says:

30 June 2010 at 21:06

Wouldn’t this get a bit expensive though if you have many subscribers? I would much rather make use of XMPP and pipe the notifications via MXit and Fring.

Reply
1. Johan Jacobs says:
  
  1 July 2010 at 10:15
  
  I like the idea of pusing notifications to MXit. External gateways is blocked in MXit with the exception of GTalk though. We will be releasing some API’s soon where one could write a service to do this for you.
  
  But why not create a whole service where users can browse our entire blog via MXit, this is already possible with what is out there.
  
  Reply
  1. Rafiq Phillips says:
    
    1 July 2010 at 14:34
    
    How do you suggest this gets done with whats out there? Can you point me int he right direction?
    
    Reply
    1. Charl van Niekerk says:
      
      1 July 2010 at 16:15
      
      Yes I’m also quite interested now. Johan, do you perhaps have some API documentation you could send me? Would be awesome to carry this further.
      
      Reply
  2. Charl van Niekerk says:
    
    1 July 2010 at 16:14
    
    Would be cool to make this more generic though so that you could push notifications for a variety of things via one central notification distribution hub according to user preference. The users only have to fill out their individual preferences once and publishers can be agnostic to this.
    
    Reply
2. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  1 July 2010 at 14:32
  
  It could be pricey but if you’re only going to use it once in a while for special reasons (not every blog post) i believe it would be handy.
  
  Reply
  1. Charl van Niekerk says:
    
    1 July 2010 at 16:17
    
    Maybe you could have two separate feeds, one for priority posts and one for all the general posts. Then you only enable SMS for the priority feed but since it doesn’t cost you anything people can still subscribe to the general feed via the other channels if they wish.
    
    Reply
Charl van Niekerk says:

30 June 2010 at 21:07

Also, WordPress supports real-time feeding via PubSubHubbub. I would much rather build this as a standalone component and run it as a service so that it will work for any PubSubHubbub-enabled feed, not just WordPress.

Reply
1. Rafiq Phillips says:
  
  1 July 2010 at 14:35
  
  Are you going to do it in your spare time? It’d be awesome 🙂
  
  Reply
  1. Charl van Niekerk says:
    
    1 July 2010 at 16:18
    
    I would most certainly like to except “spare time” isn’t exactly plentiful right now, but if and when I get the time I would like to carry this further. If anybody else wants to join me, please ping me ASAP.
    
    Reply
Rafiq Phillips says:

7 July 2010 at 13:06

You can now download the SMS plugin from the WordPress plugin directory http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clickatell-sms-subscription-manager/

Reply
Jose Gil says:

17 December 2014 at 19:15

Whoops!
We couldn’t find that plugin.

Reply

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SMS Alert WordPress Plugin idea

Question: What do these things all have in common? Everybody know…

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