Send and receive SMSes in PHP

Question

I have two questions.

1. I want to send SMSes from a web-site in PHP to the user giving information about his orders. I need an SMS to be displayed as 'TD-COMPANY-NAME' as we normally get it from some big e-commerce web-sites. How do I achieve this? Any pointers how this is done? I am just going round and round on googling.

2. Also, there are several other operators who will be sending SMSes to the application in a specific format which will get parsed and respective updates will be done in the database. How do I achieve this?

Note: This application is designed to work in India locally. And the backend is PHP and MySQL.

Answer 1

Send and receive SMSes in PHP

Check out Nexmo and Twilio.

I've used both. I think Twilio has a shallower learning curve. But Nexmo offers free incoming messages. So depending on your application, that could play a huge factor (for example, an SMS voting system).

Both have excellent documentation and PHP code samples.