Setting Up SMS Verification

With a Professional tier license for One-Time Password, you can take advantage of not only the standard email verification, but also SMS verification!

Note: SMS verification requires an active Professional tier One-Time Password license be installed on your site.

Getting Started

To begin setting up SMS verification, you’ll want to navigate to the Forms > Settings > One-Time Password settings page in Gravity Forms. Under the input for the license key you’ll see a module labeled
SMS Configuration.

If your license has access to SMS verification, you’ll see the settings to configure your Twilio account details and can move on to the section below. If your license tier does not have access to SMS verification, you’ll be prompted with a message to upgrade your license.

Setting up your Twilio account

SMS verification is powered by Twilio, a communication platform specializing in a number of services, that we’ll be using to send the One-Time Passwords via SMS. To use SMS verification you’ll need to bring your own Twilio account to the product that the SMS will be processed through and sent from which does include additional costs not associated with your license fees through us, our solution is essentially the middle man between Gravity Forms and SMS sent via your Twilio account.

Twilio will give you a bit of starting funds as a trial normally, but it is important to keep in mind that there are additional costs of using SMS than just using our product as is, you are also paying for your usage of Twilio and their service.

Below is a list of steps that will walk you through creating a Twilio account and adding the necessary API keys to hook your account up to the product. If you already have a Twilio account with a registered phone number, you can skip to step 3 below.

Note: These earlier steps on the Twilio end are accurate as of the writing of this documentation. As we don’t control the Twilio site end, locations of specific things mentioned in these steps may change from time to time that are not yet reflected here.

1. Visit the Twilio registration form here and run through the account setup process. Twilio will usually ask you some questions about how you plan to use Twilio, set up verification for your account, etc. Just go through those steps as you’re prompted with them, to our knowledge none of them have any specific affect on our product.
2. Once you’re fully through the Twilio set up wizard, you’ll be redirected to your account dashboard. The next step to take is to affiliate a phone number with your Twilio account. Sometimes on a new account Twilio will guide you to do this and get started, but to purchase a number navigate to Phone Numbers > Manage > Buy a number in the sidebar under the Develop tab. Here you’ll see a list of available phone numbers to purchase, find one that meets your needs and run through the entire process to purchase the number and any additional verification Twilio prompts you for.
   

   

   
   
3. Now that you have a Twilio account with a number associated with it, you’ll need to hook up that account to One-Time Password. To do this, navigate to the Account dropdown in the Twilio header and select the “API keys & tokens” option.
   

   

   
   

   Under the Auth Tokens heading, you’ll see both Live and Test credentials for you account listed.

   
   

   

   
   

   Each of these sets of credentials need to be copy and pasted into their corresponding inputs in your One-Time Password settings. For the auth tokens, you will need to click the icon to reveal the token before copy and pasting. Once you have everything copied over, save your settings and if all is synced up properly your settings should look like the following:

   
   

   

   
   

And that’s it for setting up Twilio and your One-Time Password settings, you’re now all set to set up your form for SMS verification.

Adding SMS Verification to your forms

To add SMS verification to your form, edit the form you’d like to add verification to and do the following:

1. Make sure you have a Phone field on the form (Advanced Fields > Phone)
2. Add a One-Time Password field to your form (Advanced Fields > One-Time Password)
3. Select the new One-Time Password field you added to your form, and select the phone field you wish to use with the field in the Source Field dropdown.
4. Select your Twilio phone number in the From Phone Number settings dropdown. (Note: if in test mode, no phone number will be listed and whatever the test number is for your Twilio account will be used automatically)
5. If you want every submitter to verify via one-time password, we’d also recommend marking the field as a required field.

And that’s it! Your form is now set up to perform SMS verification!

There are a few additional settings available in the One-Time Password field you may want to tweak depending on your needs, you can see a full breakdown of the One-Time Password field, its settings, and various aspects to keep in mind when configuring each in our documentation here.