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Building Text Message Group Chat with the Nexmo SMS API and PHP

Blog post from Vonage

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Tim Lytle
Word Count
1,815
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Summary

To exercise the new PHP client library a bit, we're going to build a simple SMS group chat where a user's inbound message is sent to all the other members of the chat. This script accepts [inbound webhooks](https://docs.nexmo.com/messaging/setup-callbacks#setting) from Nexmo, and processes the message. The logic here is simple, if the user is subscribed and active, their message should be sent to all the _other_ members. We need to check that the user is able to post a message to the group. If we found a user in the database, it means they were at some time subscribed to the group, but we need to check if they've left. The script uses regular expressions and `switch` statements to handle different commands and messages. It also logs important events such as users joining or leaving a group, sending a message, or replying to a user's message. Once all the message are sent, it adds the new message to the log collection on the database. With that we've setup a simple script that accepts inbound messages, replies to some of them, and relays others to a group. The command concept could be extended to more complex and interactive auto-responder bots, or this could be repurposed as a SMS distribution list that allows anyone to send an inbound message to a group of people.