Hey Mazi, we tried a few and ended up using MessageBird.

Hi
I tried to install the plugin, but when I copy the folder and Php file in the plugin folder, the plugin manager page cannot load!
what's the wrong with the installation?

The plugin is over a year old, so probably not compatible with LimeSurvey 3.x.

nowadays people are more using their mobile phone and more check their messages via SMS or social media than Emails. can anybody build a plugin to send invitation link via SMS or viber, telegram, etc?

I will update the code and upload it tomorrow.
@hmd_bakhshi some settings are required before installing the plugin. Did you purchase credit for a SMS Gateway and set up the passwords??

not yet. because still I cannot install the plugin.

If you set up your survey accordingly and work with a proper SMS gateway provider which supports sending SMS based on emails sent to their service, you don't need a plugin at all.

We have just successfully finished a project at which we have used messagebird.com as SMS gateway. When setting up the process of sending the invitations correctly, you can directly send invitation emails to the service which turns the emails into SMS.

This allows to
- use the Limesurvey email invitation feature for sending SMS
- use the email templates to define SMS sender and SMS content
- use a cronjob to schedule email sending

Regarding the later: For a medial research project we are sending a new SMS weekly so people can file a new response reagrding their current health status. We also added some additional code to our email cronjob to re-set some participant details like "uses left", "completed" and the like so they can start a new data set once they received another invitation by SMS.

Dear hmd_bakhshi, I updated the code to be compatible with Limesurvey v3.15. I re-wrote the installation steps as well to include more details. The SMS gateway account and Google URL Shortener should be set up before the installation. If you have any other questions, please let me know.
github.com/MZeit/SendSMSInvites

thanks alot. would you mind tell me exactly what features the SMS gateway should have for using email service of gateway for sending SMS? I want to ask the SMS provider about them.

You need to make sure that the SMS Gateway uses HTTP requests so that Limesurvey can communicate with it to send the SMS. I recommend MessageBird ( developers.messagebird.com/docs/alternatives )

At our work-flow we are using the mobile phone numbers as email address and use an address like +49177123456@sms.messagebird.com where +49177123456 is the mobile phone number.
As sender we are using the phone number set up when registering for the service.

The system then receives the emails at sms.messagebird.com and turns them into SMS which get sent to e.g. +49177123456

so whats the different when we use the core feature of the Limesurvey and when we use the plugin?