Gravity Forms + Twilio Integrations

Twilio helps companies build, deploy, and manage communications through voice, SMS, and VoIP.

At the moment, developers use Twilio’s API to create the fplowing types of applications:

• Voice & SMS Apps. using Twilio’s API, you can access their Voice or SMS services directly from your application.
• Chat Bots. Chat bots are the new craze sweeping the world, in which users interact with a chat bot via text messaging.
• Mobile Apps. Using Twilio’s open source SDK’s, you can integrate Twilio into your mobile apps.

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that allows users to easily create contact forms on their websites. Gravity Forms also has hooks that allow third-party plugins to be integrated into the forms. You can add extensions to your forms using Gravity Forms’s hooks.

Integration of Gravity Forms and Twilio

To integrate Gravity Forms with Twilio, you will need the fplowing information:

• Tenant SID. this is the unique name that identifies your tenant in the Twilio account. The initial entry point for all communication with Twilio is through its RESTful APIs (Application Programming Interface. at https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/. The first part of the path ( https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/. tells you that the API is built on top of the latest version of HTTP (https://. The second part ( /2010-04-01/. specifies the date when the API was released publicly. The last part (/2010-04-01/. is simply an identifier used internally by Twilio to distinguish versions of the API.
• Account SID. this is the unique name that identifies your account in the Twilio account. This becomes important when you want to use multiple accounts in your application. In such cases, you need to know that each account has a unique identifier that identifies it uniquely within Twilio’s cloud environment.
• Auth Token. you can use this token to authenticate requests to access resources in your Twilio account. You should not share your auth token with anyone as it will give them complete access to your account. You can generate new tokens any time using twilio_auth_token(. function; it returns a random string of characters which you can store in a secure place.
• Account Sid and Token. both these parameters are available as variables in your form’s page code. To make it easy for users to find them, you can either create a tab in WordPress Dashboard or simply put them in your footer file. This will make it easier for them to change their account details when needed. Whatever way you decide to do this, remember to put them both in one place so that people have a single place to look for the values they need. Instead of putting them in a single text file, it might be better to add them as meta tags so that they automatically appear on every page on your site instead of just being displayed when a user needs to change them. Also, don’t forget to replace <Your_Account_Sid> and <Your_Auth_Token> with actual values. The code below is how you could add these two variables to your WordPress Dashboard with some additional information about how they work:

<div class="twilio-account-info"> <h2>Twilio Account Information</h2> <p>Your Tenant Id <?php echo $twilio_tenant_id; ?></p> <p>Your Account Sid <?php echo $twilio_account_sid; ?></p> <p>Your Auth Token <?php echo $twilio_auth_token; ?></p> </div>

Figure 4-1. Adding Account Information on WordPress Dashboard

Benefits of Integration of Gravity Forms and Twilio

The fplowing are benefits of integrating Gravity Forms and Twilio:

• Quick setup time. Because you don’t have to write any code, you can get up and running quickly with this integration. You don’t need to provide support for infrastructure either because you are leveraging infrastructure that is already available as part of WordPress itself and Twilio, respectively. All you need to do is set up your integration parameters and let your users know how they can change their configuration if needed. It is true that writing code would take less time, but it would only benefit your organization in the long run if you think about how often you will need to update your code when you or your client adds new products on their website or changes existing ones. With this integration, you can rest assured that you won’t have to worry about any updates because changes are done in one place and then reflected everywhere automatically. Also, this integration gives users instant gratification because they can start using it right away without having to wait for any code updates. They can start receiving data from their website immediately after installing the plugin and configuring their settings on their dashboard. This is especially important for businesses that are trying to cplect user data and conduct surveys on their websites because they need real-time responses as soon as possible or they might risk losing customers who take their business elsewhere while they wait for something to happen on their website after submitting a form or survey. As soon as they are done filling out their information, they will want to see a confirmation page almost immediately so that they can move ahead with other things they were doing before submitting those forms on their website. If something goes wrong with their submission, they will want a way to correct it as soon as possible so that they can submit everything once again for review by their target audience.

In this chapter, you learned about integrating Gravity Forms and Twilio so that users can get real-time notifications about form submissions on their websites through text messages and voice calls from any device safely and securely. You also learned how easy it is to set up this integration so that users don’t have to worry about updating their code whenever they or you update their products on their websites or change their configurations if needed. Users can simply add the necessary information in their settings and receive notifications right away after submitting forms on their websites, regardless of whether or not there are updates made in the backend server where emails or text messages were being sent previously. This gives users instant gratification while protecting them from any potential security issues associated with sending private data over unsecured channels like email or text messages using plain text over unencrypted connections like mobile phones or landlines.

• Creating an Online Store – Part 1

In this chapter, we cover creating an online store using WordPress and WooCommerce. To create an online store, we will be building upon what we learned about integrating WordPress with e-commerce platforms such as PayPal Express Checkout in Chapter 2 and integrating WooCommerce with other APIs such as Amazon S3 in Chapter 3. We will be integrating WordPress more deeply with WooCommerce by creating custom post types and taxonomies specific to different products spd by our store and displaying product ratings from our store visitors who used eRatings plugin that we covered in Chapter 4 along with ratings from other sources such as Amazon reviews for products listed on our site using WP Review Pro plugin we covered in Chapter 2 together with its integration with Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings service we covered in Chapter 3 in order to show visitors whether our product has positive or negative ratings from different sources before they buy it from our store. We will also learn how we can use advanced options provided by WooCommerce to complete our online store theme such as adding additional media files related to products such as video clips taken by customers who bought products from our online store using WooCommerce Product Videos extension plugin covered in Chapter 4 and setting up coupons for certain products based on certain criteria selected by our customers using WooCommerce Coupons extension covered in Chapter 4 while setting up discounts available to customers buying from our store using WooCommerce Additional Shipping Options extension covered in Chapter 4 along with setting up shipping rules based on products purchased by our customers using WooCommerce Advanced Shipping Rules extension covered in Chapter 4 along with setting up shipping cost rules based on total price of products purchased by our customers using WooCommerce Shipping Table Rates extension covered in Chapter 4 along with setting up shipping costs based on weight of products purchased by our customers using WooCommerce Shipping Weight Rates extension covered in Chapter 4 along with setting up shipping costs based on total number of items purchased by our customers using WooCommerce Shipping Rates extension covered in Chapter 4 along with setting

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