Twilio sending messages and receiving back in cell phone - codeigniter

Question

I am using Twilio rest API for Php and want to create an application to send and receive text messages.
We have many senders and every one wants to send and receive their messages. And every one want to receive text messages on their cell phone.
Is it possible to send text message to some one and we get our reply to our cell phone?
I am new in tiwlio so please can you guide me the procedure of sending and receiving text messages.
I have implemented sending part and not getting how to receive messages back on cell phone if someone reply.
Thanks

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.
When someone replies with a message to a Twilio phone number, Twilio will take the message and send it to a URL you define as an HTTP request. You can then decide what to do with the message.
You can, for example, forward the message on to another number. There is a restriction here in that you cannot forward the message and make it appear to have come from the original sender, you have to set the caller ID as one of your Twilio numbers. You can include the original sending number as part of the message though.
To do this, you would need to respond to the HTTP request with some TwiML. This is a subset of XML that tells Twilio what to do with the message. To forward the message including the original sender number, you would use the <Message> TwiML element from PHP like this:
<?php
$from = $_REQUEST['From'];
$body = $_REQUEST['Body'];
$forwarding_number = "THE NUMBER TO FORWARD THE MESSAGE TO";
// we'll forward from the Twilio number that received the message
$caller_id = $_REQUEST['To'];
header("Content-type: text/xml");
echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";
?>
<Response>
<Message to="<?php echo $forwarding_number; ?>" from="<?php echo $caller_id; ?>">
Message from <?php echo $from; ?>: <?php echo $body; ?>
</Message>
</Response>
As I said though, there are limitations on this, the message will be sent to your users phone from your Twilio number. In reality, you likely want to be able to reply to the message again, so it's perhaps better to just send a notification to your users and build an application that can receive those messages and display them in a dashboard, using the API to respond to them.
I have started an example of this sort of app here on GitHub (it's built in Node.js, but might give you an idea).
Let me know if that helps at all.