5 New Major Features In Our WordPress Plugin
Did you try out our free WordPress-plugin yet? If you haven’t, then maybe now should be the time! The plugin enables you to send texts straight from WordPress, and based on a lot of great input from the first movers, we have been hard at work since our initial release, developing exactly what the community asked of us. The result is a plugin that gives you all you need for a full SMS Customer Club. And, like always it is fully open source and free!
~80% of our time is spent developing what you requested!
The absolute majority of what has been made in the previous months, was done due to feedback from people like you! We’re taking all input seriously and around 80% of the ideas and suggestions we have received so far, has directly resulted in a new feature or an improvement to an existing feature. We believe that by listening to our users, we are developing something that’s actually useful to a lot of you, instead of us trying to guess what you need. Obviously we don’t implement whatever you ask, as some requests are deemed too business specific, but the absolute majority of input so far, has resulted in the users getting their requests solved – and at no cost to the user!
We’re very actively developing the WordPress-plugin and we could still use your input. If you find that something is missing or could use improvement, don’t discard the plugin just yet, but get in touch instead! It’s very likely that your needs will be solved in the near future. We listen and we act on your feedback!
So what exactly have we been up to since the last post about WordPress? Well, a lot!
Short codes for signup/update/unsubscribe/send sms
We have created our own short codes, requiring no other external plugins, for adding forms to your website for signup, update, unsubscribing as well as actually sending SMS messages from the frontend. There’s even support for a two-step process, which confirms the phone number of the recipients, by sending them an SMS with a unique one-time token.
These forms use standard HTML5 and are thus very easy to style and, in many cases, your existing theme probably includes styling which works well with the markup we generate.
Meta fields
We have made it possible to add an unlimited number of extra fields to your recipients, as well as picking the field types that should be used for entering the extra information. This enables you to add for instance date pickers to select birthdates, checkboxes to select preferences etc.
All of the meta fields added to recipients are of course available via our short codes and available for use in the SMS messages you send! You can therefore send an SMS and have personal information about each recipient automatically merged into your SMS messages.
Integration with Contact Form 7
While our own shortcodes, as described above, surely works well for many, others prefer to integrate SMS-related functionality into their existing forms.
While there are many great frontend form plugins, we decided to begin the external integration journey with Contact Form 7-integration. The main reason for this plugin is that Contact Form 7 is free, open source and very popular, thus we believe that we reach the broadest audience.
You can now create forms with Contact Form 7 and, without you doing anything but activating the GatewayAPI-plugin, you now get support for GatewayAPI form fields!
The support is still pretty new, so if it doesn’t suit your needs, then please get in touch. We would love to hear what you believe could improve.
Receive SMS messages in WordPress
Previously you could send SMS messages from your WordPress, but now you can actually also receive SMS messages! What this means is that you now get an ‘Inbox’ in your backend and each time an SMS is sent to a number and keyword properly associated, the SMS messages will go straight into this inbox. You can even export all received SMS messages straight into a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet!
It is even possible – and quite easy – to automate actions based on the incoming SMS messages. For now we have enabled automatic reply based in the incoming SMS via the user interfaces, but more automated actions will be added in the future. It is also possible to implement your own custom automated actions programmatically, as all incoming SMS messages trigger WordPress action hooks.
Importing recipients from a spreadsheet
Already have a database of recipients? Well, just open your favourite spreadsheet app, select all recipients and simply paste them into the backend, including all the meta data you have! A few moments later, and all your recipients are imported and ready to have SMS messages sent to them. It’s really that simple! No CSV-jugling or other techy-stuff! Just good-old copy-paste.
Thanks to the community!
Thanks to all of the users who has written and given their feedback so far! Some users have spent many hours writing ideas and reporting bugs, and some have even been testing early releases containing bits and pieces developed based on their feedback. While they got the features they asked for, they still spent hours they could have spent otherwise, and for that we are very thankful.
Ready to try the plugin?
Well then hurry over to the WordPress Plugin Directory or simply click here!