Improved SMS Docs

We’ve had countless customers tell us that they love our product, but fewer people gush about our documentation. As an infrastructure company, having great docs is just as important as boosting call quality and SMS delivery rates. This is why, as part of our focus on making our product the best it can be, we’ve put together a small task force to improve our documentation. We hope that the improvements we’re making help ensure that both novice and seasoned developers have a great experience with Plivo.

We researched and referenced some of the documentation that we like, then prioritized the top six things we want to do:

1. Lower the learning curve: We often take our own knowledge for granted and forget how hard it was for each of us to learn a new platform. To lower that learning curve, we’re breaking down the Getting Started section into more foundational steps.
2. Build a better foundation: By breaking down and simplifying each step, we’re trying build a better understanding for our developer customers. Each tutorial will build on the ones before it.
3. More comprehensive: Telecom is full of technical jargon that’s important for conceptualizing how web and mobile apps interact with telecom infrastructure. Therefore, you’ll see us explain certain concepts in more detail to bring more transparency to the way telecom works.
4. Focus on what’s important: To highlight what’s important, we’ve added note sections to mark up the essential parts to each tutorial.
5. Better code markup: We’ve upgraded our syntax highlighter to include line numbers and support for more languages.
6. More languages: Our Getting Started section is full of examples, but most of them were written in Python. You’ll now see how everything can be done in Ruby, Java, PHP, .NET, and Curl as well.

To start things off, we’ve added more getting started tutorials for SMS. And in the next few weeks, you can expect to see a lot more improvements.

Here are some of new SMS tutorials we’ve added:

• Send a Single SMS Message: Send an outbound SMS text message to any phone number. Use cases: two-factor authentication, notifications, communication apps, etc.
• Receive an SMS Message: Receive SMS text messages in 19 countries around the world. Use cases: ride hailing, delivery coordination, surveys and polling, two-factor authentication, etc.
• Reply to an Incoming SMS Message: Interact with end users using SMS text messages. Use cases: product reviews, dating apps, purchase verification, etc.
• Forward an Incoming SMS Message: Redirect incoming messages to another phone number. Use cases: help desks, sales teams, CRM, etc.
• Handle SMS Delivery Reports: Set up a web server to handle all of your delivery reports. Use cases: customer dashboards, analytics, calculating ROI, etc.
• Forward SMS to Email: Forward SMS text messages on your phone number to your email inbox.