Foreword

Read this before you get started with django-twilio. This will hopefully answer some questions about the purpose of the project, and why you should (or shouldn’t) be using it.

Purpose

Building telephony applications has always been something of a complex and time consuming task for developers. With the advent of Twilio, developers were able to build large scale telephony applications for the first time, without the massive learning curve associated with traditional telephony development.

While Twilio’s APIs allow you to build powerful voice and SMS apps in your favorite programming language, it can still be quite difficult and time consuming to roll out your own telephony apps for your Django-powered website.

The core purpose of django-twilio is to abstract away as much telephony knowledge as possible, so that you can focus on the functionality and logic of your telephony app, and have it seamlessly integrate into your website without confusion.

Use Case

django-twilio is a complete solution for anyone who wants to integrate voice or SMS functionality into their Django website without requiring any additional infrastructure.

Here are some common use cases:

  • You want to build one or more telephone conference rooms for talking with co-workers or clients.
  • You want be able to accept SMS messages from your clients, and respond to them programmatically.
  • You want to record important phone calls (incoming or outgoing) and store the recordings for analysis.
  • You want to track telephone marketing campaigns, and review detailed data.
  • You want to build rich, interactive telephone systems. (EG: “Press 1 to talk with a sales agent, press 2 to schedule a reservation, press 3 to purchase a hat.”)
  • And many more.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Before getting started with django-twilio, it will serve you best to read the How it Works page on Twilio’s website. That describes the architecture and API flow that all of your applications will be using, and that django-twilio will help to abstract.

django-twilio also depends on the official Twilio python library, so you may want to familiarize yourself with their docs before continuing so you have a good idea of how things work.

Other than that, you’re good to go!