The “Settings” tab
Within this tab, the authentication details for Twilio are entered and the settings relating to licensing, inbound message handling, notifications and some general settings can be configured.
Settings tabs
The Settings tab is split into the following subsection:
- Get started
- Licence Keys
- Inbound Message Settings
- Notification Settings
- General Settings
- System Info
This subsection provides a short list of instructions to get you up and running with the plugin.
Use this subsection to enter your Twilio Acccount SID and your Twilio Authentication Token. These are obtained from Twilio, when you register for your account and purchase your Twilio number.
Once you have entered your Twilio account details, press the Save button. The phone numbers drop down list, will then be populated with your Twilio phone numbers. Select the number you want to send messages from and press the Save button again.
Alternatively, rather than sending your messages from a single Twilio number, you can send messages from a Messaging Service, which is configurable from within your Twilio dashboard. Using a messaging service, instead of a single Twilio phone number has several advantages:
- A messaging service can contain one or more numbers i.e. you can create a number pool, using which Twilio will distribute your messages.
- Twilio recommend sending no more than 200 messages from a single number per day. Using multiple Twilio numbers lessens the likelihood that your messages are will be blocked by the mobile networks as spam.
- The messages are sent asynchronously from the plugin to Twilio, meaning they are sent to Twilio much quicker than if a single number is used.
To see the full range of features included in a Twilio Messaging Service take a look at Twilio’s Copilot documentation.
Twilio Account SID
Enter the Account SID number that you received when you registered with Twilio.
Twilio Auth Token
Enter the Twilio Auto Token that you received when you registered with Twilio.
Messaging Service SID
Select one of the Twilio Messaging Services that you have configured within your Twilio account. It’s highly recommended that you setup a messaging service from your Twilio account, to send you messages from.
Use Messaging Service
Checking the checkbox tells JOT to send the messages using the Messaging Service selected above.
Phone Numbers
Once you have entered and saved your Twilio account details, this dropdown will contain your Twilio master phone number and any sub-account numbers. Select the number you wish to SMS and voice messages from. Click the “Save Settings” button to remember your selected number.
Number URL
For the plugin to receive messages, your Twilio number needs to be configured to forward messages from Twilio to the plugin. This can be configured manually (see Inbound Message Settings below) or using the “Configure” button shown at the top of this page, when the number URL is not set.
Messaging Service URL
For the plugin to receive messages, your selected Twilio Messaging service needs to be configured to forward messages from Twilio to the plugin. This can be configured manually (see Inbound Message Settings below) or using the “Configure” button shown at the top of this page, when the number URL is not set.
Your country code
The plugin will verify that each phone number entered through the admin screens or through the subscriber web forms is valid. The number is sent to Twilio for validation. To validate the number, Twilio requires a country code, as it will prefix the number with the country code in order to validate it. Use this field to select your country code. The default code is for the United States.
When you purchase JOT Pro, you will be sent a licence key. Entering and activating your licence key will enable automatic updates, available from the WordPress dashboard. When new versions of the plugin are available, they will be posted on this site and you’ll get a notification on your WP dashboard that an upgrade is available.
Enter your licence key
Enter the licence key sent to you when you purchased the plugin. If you’ve purchased a single site licence, then then licence key will enable automatic updates on one site. If you’ve purchased a multi-site licence, then the key can be used on multiple sites (current 6 or 10 sites).
Licence Activation status
Once you’ve entered your licence key, then press the “Activate licence” button. You licence is validated and your status should change to “Active” or “valid”.
If you’ve lost your licence key or the licence is not activating, the please contact jotplugin@gmail.com
Twilio’s “A Message Comes In” field
To enable inbound SMS messages to be received by the JOT plugin, the URL shown in the “SMS Request URL” field must be configured within your Twilio account or using the “Configure” button on the Messaging-Settings-Twilio-Settings page.
Once the URL is configured, Twilio will send all SMS messages received by your number to the plugin using the URL, www.your_website.com?inbound , therefore this URL must be accessible by Twilio. If you are behind a firewall or using security software that would block access to the ?inbound URL, you’ll need to make a firewall change or change the settings of your security software.
To check that Twilio has access to the ?inbound URL, enter www.your_website.com?inbound into a browser. If you see a response saying “Joy Of Text Pro Plugin – Think you’ve taken a wrong turn.”, then connection has been established with the plugin.
To manually configure the ?inbound URL, go onto the Twilio website, select your number and cut and paste the URL shown in “SMS Request URL” field into Twilio’s “A Message Comes In” input box and save, as shown below.
On the Inbound Message Settings page, you can specify a keyword, which will show members their current subscriptions.
For example, in the image above, the keyword is set to “mygroups”. When a user sends a text to your Twilio number containing the word ‘mygroups’, they will receive a text message containing a list of all the groups they are currently subscribed to, with the opt-in and opt-out keywords shown for each group.
The keyword you’ve selected for managing your subscriptions can be included in your outgoing messages, by using the new merge tag %jot_submgr%.
The JOT plugin can receive SMS messages sent to your selected Twilio number. When a message is received you can choose to route the incoming message to a JOT group or to an email address. For example, customers may send you an SMS in response to a promotion advertised on your site. You can chose to route this message onto to a group containing several phone numbers or a single email address, allowing you to be responsive to your customers’ enquiries.
Group to send notifications to
Select the group you want to send notifications to. This is an optional field, if no group is selected, SMS notifications will not be sent.
Email address to route SMS messages to :
You can enter an email address route inbound SMS messages to. This is an optional field.
To configure the content of the routed messages, use the settings under the “Inbound message and subscription notifications” section.
Inbound SMS notifications?
Click the checkbox, if you want an SMS message to be sent, when you receive an SMS messages to your Twilio number.
Ignore subscriptions
Click the checkbox if you don’t want to be notified of inbound messages that contain keywords and opt-out.
Ignore banned
Click the checkbox if you don’t want to be notified of inbound messages received from numbers on the banned list.
Inbound Notification message
Use this field to specify the format of the routed message.
The routed message can contain the special tags shown below:
- %fullname% or %name% – when the message is sent, this tag is replaced by the message sender’s full name (if known).
- %firstname% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s first name (if known).
- %lastname% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s first name (if known).
- %number% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s phone number.
- %id% – the user id of the message sender.
- %message% – the body of the inbound message.
Subscription notifications
Click the checkbox, if you want an SMS message to be sent, when you someone subscribes to a group.
Subscription Notification message
Use this field to specify the format of the subscription notificationmessage.
The subscription message can contain the special tags shown below:
- %fullname% or %name% – when the message is sent, this tag is replaced by the message sender’s full name (if known).
- %firstname% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s first name (if known).
- %lastname% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s first name (if known).
- %number% – the tag is replaced by the message sender’s phone number.
- %id% – the user id of the message sender.
- %message% – the body of the inbound message.
Email subject line
Choose the subject line for your email, if you’ve enabled email notifications by entering an email address in the field above.
Routed SMS suffix
You can choose to append a suffix at the end of routed messages, so that you know where the message has come from.
Enter default Sender ID- NOT supported in the USA.
Twilio supports Sender IDs, which can be used for message branding, by replacing your phone number with an alphanumeric string of characters. To set a default Sender ID, enter your brand into this field. The Sender ID can be up to 11 characters long. If a default value is set, this Sender ID will be used for all automatic responses, such as when users subscribe to a group or an auto-group. The list of countries where Twilio supports Sender IDs, can be found here.
Voice preferences
You can use these settings to select the gender and the accent of the voice used when making text-to-voice calls.
Select Voice – select a male or female voice for the text-to-voice calls.
Select Voice Language – select the language/accent for text-to-voice calls.
Answer Machine Detection – Click the checkbox to enable Twilio’s answering machine detection.
Plugin Tabs
Select default tab – select your preferred default tab. When you first start the plugin (by clicking the Messaging link from the WordPress dashboard), the plugin will open the tab you’ve selected here.
Admin settings
Provided that the “SMS request URL” has been configured in Twilio, the remote commands can be sent to the plugin from a selected group. Members of the selected group will have permission to send commands from their mobile phones.
The remote commands allow group details to be retrieved and allow SMS messages to be sent to groups.
The commands available are:
#(number)(message) – This command will send the message to the specified number. For example #07790532801 Hi there %name% thanks for your message
@(user id)(message) – This command will send the message to the specified member’s phone.
[get groups {search string}]. This command, send from the specified admin number, to the JOT plugin, will retrieve a list of all of the groups configured within the plugin.
Optionally, if the search string is specified, all groups containing the search string in the name of the group, will be returned.
For example [get groups cust] – will return all groups, where the group name contains the string ‘cust’.
The group list is returned to the admin number as an SMS message. The message contains as unique identifier of each group (the groupid) and the group name.
[get group (groupid) {search string}]. If only the groupid is specified, this command will retrieve all members of the group with that groupid.
For example [get group 50] will retrieve all of the member details (name and cell number) of the group number 50.
By specifying the optional {search string} parameter, only the members whose name contains the search string will be returned.
For example [get group 50 john] will return the details of messages whoes name contains ‘john’ within group number 50.
[send group (groupid)] (message). This command will send an SMS message to all members of the given group (specified by the groupid). All of the text after the command
is sent in the SMS message.
For example, [send group 50]Hello everyone. Due to the weather, training is cancelled today. This command will send everyone in group 50, a message telling them they have the morning off!
All command responses are limited to 320 character SMS messages. All responses over 320 characters, will be truncated.
Commands can be enclosed in square brackets [] or forward slashes //, for example
[get groups] or /get groups/
Banned Numbers
Phone numbers placed in this field will not be allowed to subscribe to groups. Numbers in this list will be blocked from subscribing if the are trying subscribe by SMS, using the JOTFORM shortcode or using a Gravity Form. Numbers should be added to the banned number list one number per line.
Enable debugging
Enabling debugging will write debug logs to a file. This file is option is useful should you need to raise a support call.
The system info tab shows a consolidated view of all of your Twilio and JOT settings. If you’ve asked for some support, you make be asked to provide the information shown on this tab.
WooCommerce Settings
For more information about WooCommerce integration please click here.
WordPress Integration Settings
For more information about the WordPress Integration Settings please click here.