This week we have been working for MAF Norway to automate the sending of SMS, E-mail and PDF creation. What we have done in the past for them is that we created a Trigger/Action module to automate their donor journeys. The actions in the trigger/action module are API calls. But what was missing up-to-today was to functionality to send e-mail, or to create a PDF Letter or send an SMS by invoking an API Call.
Note: the trigger/action module is a very experimental module just developed for the MAF. At the same time we are developing a CiviRules modules which will work in a similair way as the Drupal Rules module.
This week we developed three extensions to accomplish this:
org.civicoop.smapi
The SMS Api has one action Send this action takes three parameters:
- contact_id - the id of the contact to which you want to send the sms
- provider_id - the id of the SMS provider which you want to use to send the sms
- template_id - the message template id of the message you want use
org.civicoop.emailapi
The E-mail Api has one action Send this action takes two required parameters:
- contact_id - the id of the contact to which you want to send the e-mail
- template_id - the message template id of the message you want use
There are also two optional parameters:
- from_name - the name of the sender
- from_email - the e-mail adress of the sender
org.civicoop.pdfapi
The PDF Api works a little bit different from the SMS and the E-mail API. Because the PDF files have to be stored at a location where somebody could print them. We have decided to use an e-mailaddress for this because that was the easiest way in processing the print job.
The PDF Api has one action Create this action takes three parameters:
- contact_id - the id of the contact to which you want to send the sms
- template_id - the message template id of the message you want use
- to_email - the e-mail address which will receive the pdf file. This could be the e-mail address of your printer or of someone who will do the printing of the pdf letters
Comments
Great sprinting - CiviCoop :) So good to see organisations taking initiative, pushing things foward, publishing their work as they go, and communicating about it as well - top marks!!
Cool,
Do you think it's generic enough to be put into civicrm core or does it need some more tuning to be ready?
Cool! These look like nicer interfaces for sending messages!
Good work. Is there a convenient way to add token replacement for a particular object from a component? For example, participant or membership or contribution tokens?
Hey Joe,
It is not really possible to set contribution, or event tokens. It works a bit similair to sending an e-mail from the action button above the contact dashboard. So the reference is always a contact.
Jaap
great work!
Could this be extend to print PDFs for a group of contacts? Receving group_id as parameter an loop through its contacts might be very useful instead of printing single contact's pdf
Hey the group_id as a parameter could be very usefull! I have developed those module for my client and they didn't have the requirement of sending to a group. So feel free to fork the extensions and change them. I am happy to merge your code afterwards.
Today Ixiam made it possible to send e-mail, pdf and sms to multiple contacts (splitted by comma's).