We\u2019re putting together a text-messaging reminder service for our meetings. Every Wednesday night at 7pm our website will send out a SMS message to the cell phones of everyone who signs up reminding them to get ready for Chi Alpha\u2019s weekly worship meeting. It\u2019s a simple message to help out those students who always mean to come but get busy doing something else and forget until the meeting is partway over:<\/p>\n
Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300\u2013300.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019ve just tested the system and it works pretty smoothly. It\u2019s the modern-day equivalent of ringing the church bells!<\/strong><\/p>\n
The script was really simple to write. If you use a unix-based system with PHP & PEAR installed you could easily adapt it for your ministry:<\/p>\n
\n#!\/usr\/bin\/php\n ?php\n\/\/sends SMS announcments to each person in Chi Alpha who wants them\n\nrequire_once('Mail.php');\n$parameters['sendmail_args']='';\n$mailer=&Mail::factory('sendmail',$parameters);\n\n$cells['Ferdinand Frosh']='5555555555';\n$cells['Suzie Sophomore']='5555555555';\n$cells['Jing Junior']='5555555555';\n$cells['Sheila Senior']='5555555555';\n\n$headers['From']='you@example.com';\n$headers['Reply-To']='you@example.com';\n$headers['Subject']='XA @ 8pm';\n$body='Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300-300';\n\nforeach ($cells as $cell) {\n if (empty($cell)) continue;\n $email=$cell.'@teleflip.com';\n \/\/echo $email;\n $mailer->send($email,$headers,$body);\n}\n?>\n<\/pre>\nAll you have to do is customize the script (add cell phone numbers and the right \u201cFrom\u201d and \u201cReply-To\u201d emails) and then add it to your crontab file with an entry like so:
\n
\n0 19 * * 4 \/path\/to\/announce.php
\n<\/code><\/p>\n(Hint: type crontab \u2011e to edit your crontab file).<\/p>\n
By the way, it should go without saying that you never add someone to an SMS announcement system without their express permission!<\/strong> If you think email spam hacks people off, then just wait until someone has to pay a text-messaging fee for something they\u2019re not interested in. The depths of their rage would astonish the Hulk.<\/p>\n
Geekspeak: the reason I used the PEAR::Mail library was to make sure that the reply-to address was the one I wanted. I just couldn\u2019t make it happen using the PHP mail() function alone. Everything was from \u201croot@my webserver.\u201d Very annoying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re putting together a text-messaging reminder service for our meetings. Every Wednesday night at 7pm our website will send out a SMS message to the cell phones of everyone who signs up reminding them to get ready for Chi Alpha\u2019s weekly worship meeting. It\u2019s a simple message to help out those students who always mean \u2026 Continue reading \u201cRinging The Church Bells Via SMS\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-reviews","category-stanfordministry-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-94","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}