Plivo SMS gateway published in the Moodle Marketplace
· by Sebastian Berm
Our fourth SMS gateway for Moodle has been published. In all honesty: it has not been tested in production, because Plivo would not give us a test account. We are looking for someone who has one.
Since version 4.5 Moodle has its own SMS subsystem, but it ships almost no providers. So if you want to send an SMS from Moodle, whether as a reminder or for two-factor authentication at login, you need a gateway plugin. We already maintained three: Textmagic, Sinch and Messagebird. Plivo now joins them.
Why Plivo
Plivo bills per message, with no subscription. That works out well at low or irregular volumes, for instance if you only use SMS for two-factor at login. If you already have a contract with one of the other three, there is no reason at all to switch: as far as Moodle is concerned, it makes no technical difference which gateway sits underneath.
Not tested in production yet
That comes with a warning, the same one you will find on the Marketplace. Plivo turned down our request for a test account. So the integration is fully built and checked against their API documentation, but no real message has ever gone through it. That is why the Marketplace lists it as a release candidate rather than stable, and why you should not roll it out blindly where two-factor guards critical access. Test it yourself first.
Do you have a Plivo account?
Then you can help us, and yourself. Email helpdesk@sebsoft.nl and we will run the final test together: we will help you set it up and fix whatever breaks. Once the gateway demonstrably delivers messages, we will release it as stable.
What you need
- Moodle 4.5 or later. The SMS subsystem does not exist on older versions, so no gateway works there.
- A Plivo account with API credentials. You pay Plivo for the messages themselves; we only supply the integration.
- Nothing else. The plugin is open source under the GPL and free to use.