The SMS Framework project has gathered a great amount of support from the developer community. Tylor at Raincity Studios has been doing some great work with fixing up the SMS Framework project, so I thought it would be good to return to my roots to upgrade the framework and contribute an important feature. We’re moving toward a 1.0 release for 5.x and ultimately upgrading to Drupal 6, so stay tuned for that.

As I’ve been moving down the issue queue reviewing and applying patches, one feature stood out to me — the need to store users’ mobile numbers in a separate table, instead of in $user->data. This will allow Drupal to identify the author of incoming SMS messages. With this feature, your visitors will be able to get updates about various events that occur on your site. For example, they can be alerted when new comments are made on their posts or when a ‘event’ node type is created. The patch includes a restructured interface for adding and confirming your mobile number. It’s very similar to Twitter and Brightkite :) The Messaging Framework makes use of the API to support SMS as a send method. Add Notifications and you’ll be able to alert users about updated content via SMS. I wanted to quickly show everyone how easy this is to set up.

1. Download the SMS Framework, the Messaging Framework, and the Notifications module and place them in your modules directory. (Also get Token as Notifications depends on it.)
2. Turn on the following modules:
3. Messaging Framework
4. SMS Messaging
5. Content Notifications
6. Notifications
7. Notifications UI
8. Token
9. Email Gateway (We’ll be using this for the example, but any gateway module should work.)
10. SMS Framework
11. SMS User
12. Go to admin/smsframework/gateways and select and configure your default gateway
13. Go to admin/notifications/settings and check ‘Notify poster of own posts’ for testing purposes
14. Go to admin/notifications/settings/ui and enable the desired subscription types
15. Go to user/1/notifications/nodetype and subscribe to the desired node type
16. Go to user/1/edit or user/1/mobile (depending on your SMS Framework build) and follow the steps to set up and confirm your mobile number
17. Post a node of that type and wait for your SMS message!

The SMS Framework module is still under development and is not recommended for production use.