Event Booking SMS text integration?

Is is possible to send confirmations/reminders/communications via a SMS text?

Hi Matt

Unfortunately, we can only send these information via email. The extension doesn't support SMS confirmation

Tuan

It seems that most computer -> SMS gateways are a paid or subscribe-to service. Something like www.experttexting.com/ seems relatively affordable (eg. $.0083 / text for US and Canada), but it would be an expense that the EventsBooking website would have to front (in addition to a plugin being built to interface with their API).

With most carriers, you can send SMS from their website or a designated email address to one of their customers, but youneed to know the cellular carrier that the customer.
In order to build this in, you would have to collect 2 pieces of information from the customer: their cell number (obviously) and their carrier (you would need a list of all carriers and their email->sms email addresses... eg see mfitzp.io/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways/ ). With this info, you *could* commission a plug-in that would send out reminder SMS message.

According to this Wikipedia article, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateway , you can use Google Sheets / Spreadsheets (whatever it is called) to send SMS as well, but that might only be a manual process with no API (haven't really looked into it).

I believe AcyMailing may be going to merge their AcySMS component in a couple of months time. After that the AcyMailing Subscription Plugin may be worth a look? Purely hypothesising!

Yes AcySMS might be the solution for this problem. I will try to look at it in the future when I have more time, right now, there are still other important features (which are used by more customers than this one) I want to work on first

Regards,

Tuan

I wrote a solution for this using Fabrik which grabs all registered users from a specific event
You can use fabrik to pull data from eb_registrants table into a custom fabrik table / list.
All you need is the field data for

• Cell phone
• Name

Then if you have an account with mobile text sending service like BulkSms or similar you can export the data from Fabrik as a CSV file and upload directly into your account.
Fabrik allows you to massage the data into the required csv /xls format of the SMS provider which is why this is such a simple and effective solution.
I tried a custom ACYsms integrated with EB but there are way more steps in getting the SMS message to be generated.

I use AcySMS for this.

The normal emails get sent by the standard Event Booking system, but every confirmed registrant (using onAfterPaymentSuccess instead of onAfterStoreRegistrant) gets added to an AcyMailing list. I send subsequent emails to customers through AcyMailing. We send texts in case of emergency (i.e. the event leaders are delayed, etc) using AcySMS which uses AcyMailing lists.

To get this to work with EB automagically, I just needed to ensure that the phone number was sent to the AcyMailing list. I did this by adjusting plugins/eventbooking/acymailing/acymailing.php to include the phone number, e.g.
It works well for it's current purpose, but my ideal would be that all registrants and waiting lists and failed payments, etc can be added to appropriate Mailing lists in AcyMailing. I would also set up my contact form to add to AcyMailing lists. Then all my emailing and texting is being managed (including unsubs) by one tool, and life would be made very easy.

Tuan, if you are going developing something on this, please let me know, and I can give more details of my ideal scenario.

Regards,
Donal

Hi Donal that sounds like a good solution too - is an acymailing list created for every event - i.e do all registrants for event x get added to a list purely for event x?
The solution my client required was to only send sms to those users registered on event x - thats why the fabrik solution works well as you can filter out those registrants. Would be interested to hear more on this.

Hi,
yes, a list exists for each event. I also have more general lists that registrants get added to, e.g. all customers autumn 2016, which can be used for mass mailings.
D