Ever run into the problem where you’ve got a lot of text you’re using for the choices in your dropdown field, but it’s getting cropped in Internet Explorer? Well, we made some changes to Wufoo forms to fix this and made a little video to show the new feature off. Enjoy!
Alright, we got some good stuff to announce today. Thanks to our man Alex, who added some sweet caching action to Wufoo reports over the last few weeks, everyone should have seen a nice boost in speed on the loading of their reports, charts and graphs. One of the nice side effects of implementing caching for our reporting system is that we were able to use that as the foundation for creating code snippets to integrate your reports and widgets into your own web sites!
To access the new Code Manager for reports, just make your report public by checking off the Public checkbox sitting to the right of your report’s name in the Report Manager. When you do this, the Code button will appear below the report’s name. The interface should be very familiar to those of you used to the Code Manager we provide for Form code snippets:
The Report Code Manager provides access to the following features:
Convenient copy/paste URLs and HTML links to your Reports hosted on Wufoo. You’ll see that we now provide encrypted permanent URL structures for users wanting links that wont change when you edit your Report’s name.
Downloadable HTML file to instantly get a full page version of your report on your site. Just like our Full Page Form Code file, all you have to do is upload the file to your server and you’ve got a Wufoo report showing from your own domain.
One click pre written email for sharing your report with friends and fellow data lovers.
And our favorite, sweet JavaScript snippets that you can use to embed individual graph, chart and number widgets from your report right into your blog posts and web pages.
These new embeddable report widgets open up a lot of possibilities for our power users wanting more flexibility in how they share their data with their users. For example, if you’ve got a totally sweet report like this created in Wufoo:
And you want to just share one of the graphs or tables of data in a blog post or web page, you can go to the Code Manager for that Report, grab the JavaScript snippet for that specific widget and paste it into a web page like this!
Yup, that’s a live widget up there based on filler content collected from one of our example forms. Or if you want to create a mini dashboard highlighting a specific metric, you can insert just the number widget from the report like this!
The possibilities are really endless. These embeddable widgets are based on live data collected from your Wufoo form, which means they’ll automatically update as new entries are collected. Because they’re based on the widgets in your report, any filters you apply or changes you make to that widget in Wufoo’s Report Builder will also automatically be reflected on the embedded version. These new features are available to all users across all plans and we hope you enjoy showcasing your data in new and exciting ways!
Over the weekend, we released a new payment integration feature that works with our good friends over at FreshBooks. You can now process online orders collected from your Wufoo form with FreshBooks’ invoices! In addition to having Wufoo collect information that you need from your users through our forms, you can automatically create a Freshbooks client profile and invoice based off of the data that is submitted.
This is great for users that want to collect information, quotes and payments from their users, but don’t want to process a credit card right away after getting that data. Instead, they can use FreshBooks to create customized invoices tailored to each quote or request and then offer those invoices at a more appropriate time in their interaction with the user. You can even have FreshBooks send those invoices via snail mail! Here’s a quick video Chris whipped up showing how that process will feel to the user:
This integration can be found in the Payment Settings for your forms along with our other merchants. Just select their service from the list of merchants to process your orders and then assign the prices to your fields just like with our other integrations with PayPal or Authorize.net. Because Wufoo needs to generate a client profile every time we send information for generating an invoice to FreshBooks, your forms will need to collect from your users their name, organization’s name and email address. Additionally, we provide a very easy field matching interface to associate all the different client information FreshBooks accepts with data collected by your forms.
We’re really excited this integration with our friends up in the north and hope you’ll enjoy using Wufoo to help jump start your invoicing journey. For more information about the advantages of using Wufoo’s payment system for creating leads and processing online orders check our our Wufoo Powered Payments page.
Hey everyone, we’ve had quite a summer here at Wufoo HQ quietly toiling away on the awesome and we’re really excited now that everything is finally in place for us to start announcing our goodies to our favorite form friends. First order of business—New payment integration features!
Some of you might have noticed that over the last few weeks Chris has silently released into the wild a number of improvements to our payment integration settings and workflows. In addition to some interface improvements, the backend has been completely rewritten to make it easier for us to add payment processors down the line. Today we’re announcing two new processors: PayPal Payments Pro and USA ePay, two of the largest and most trusted gateways on the Internet.
One thing our payment veterans will be excited to hear about with these specific integrations is that after a Wufoo form is submitted, the user will not be taken to another page on the processor or gateway’s web site. Instead, we’ve designed our own payment summary page so that your users will experience a seamless flow from data submission to payment collection. Watch this video to see the new integrated payment experience in action.
Because we liked this new workflow so much, we’ve also added an Authorize.net integrated workflow as well. If you’re currently using the old way with Authorize.net, you can easily switch over to Authorize.net Integrated in your merchant settings.
We did our best to create an integrated payment system that we think is one of the best ecommerce experiences your users can have on the Internet. Not only do we think it looks great, it comes with a number of powerful features:
No Redirect - If you’ve embedded the form on your site, Wufoo doesn’t take you off your web page. The payment step happens seamlessly on your web site.
Payment Summary - Your payment page presents all the charges associated with the choices they made on your Wufoo form so that they have all the information they need to verify and complete the transaction successfully.
Collect Shipping Address - You can toggle your payment form to optionally collect a shipping address from the user. The payment form can automatically base it on the billing address or specify their own.
Professionally Designed Email Invoices - You can have your payment form request an email address from your users so that they receive an invoice / receipt of the transaction for their records. These invoices can be customized with your own message, footer and data from our templating system. View sample invoice.
Live Previews - No need to publish and submit test entries every time you make changes to your settings. Our preview features in the Payment Settings interface allow you to see how your themes, selections and copy affect your payment page and email invoices.
Theme Friendly - Your payment page automatically matches the colors and branding you use with your Wufoo form. That means look of your tables and fields automatically coordinate their colors with your theme for a high quality, professional experience.
We’ve also beefed up our Wufoo Powered Payments page to help us promote these new features to you, your friends and your colleagues. Please note that the new payment integration features are available to users on the Bona Fide ($24.95/month) plans and higher, but all users can try out payment integration for 5 transactions for free. To access these settings, just click on the Payment button under your form’s name in the Form Manager and start making money.
This coming Saturday, October 10th, at 11:00pm EST, we will be moving Wufoo to a new home with Rackspace. During this move we are expecting all services to be unavailable for 30 minutes.
If you’re up or interested, you can follow our progress during the downtime on our Tumblr Status Blog and/or Twitter feed.
First and foremost, we would like to emphasize that this move is not an emergency move. We have been planning the move with Bitpusher, who currently hosts and administrates Wufoo, since July, and we will continue working with them as administrators after the move. The idea to move came about during the summer when we felt we were stretched too thin. Rapid growth led to scaling problems that, even though we were able to solve them, left us feeling unprepared. We felt that if we could find a company to take care of the hardware, networking and redundancy side of things, we would be able to start focusing on rolling out new features. Rackspace provides us with a best class infrastructure supported by an army of engineers, which gives us the confidence we are leaving nothing to chance.
The immediate benefits of the move are not readily apparent, but they are significant. In a sentence — more eyes leads to more reliability. More eyes will be watching backups to make sure they ran. More eyes will be watching our server usage to see if any thresholds have been passed. More eyes will be looking for any potential problem that could affect our service. We take pride in the responsibility you place in us, and we’re excited to be doing our part by adding more resources as we grow.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve implemented a new smart captcha system to protect the data integrity of all forms powered by Wufoo. A captcha is a test used on a web site to make sure that the data being submitted to a form is actually coming from a human and not an automated bot or script. They’re used to prevent abuse and data contamination.
While a number of our users have requested this feature from us for awhile, we’ve been hesitant because a number of studies have shown that when a captcha is used on a form, it severely impacts the conversion rate. This is because it also slows down and turns away legitimate users, who often get frustrated by the extra test.
In an effort to balance the needs of our users who want to insure the integrity of their data with our desire to promote best practices for high converting forms, we implemented a smart captcha system in Wufoo that tries to automatically detect abusive behavior and only show a captcha test in those situations. Here’s a video screencast we made to show off the feature in action.
We’re also very proud to be using reCaptcha to help power our new anti-bot system. They’re used by web sites all over the world and we think it’s great that we’ll also be able to help digitize texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format for preservation and accessibility.
By default, all forms in Wufoo are set to automatic protection, but you can also set the captcha system to always show or never show the captcha on your form as well. You can find this feature’s options under the form settings tab when you edit your form.
This Saturday at 1:00am, we will be moving the Wufoo servers to a new data center. During this move, Wufoo’s services will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours. Please make appropriate plans for your site during this period.
If you’re up or interested, you can follow our progress during the downtime on our Tumblr Status Blog and/or Twitter feed.
Over the past two months, we’ve unfortunately had a number of incidents that can be sourced to our current data center. As some of you are aware, we had three separate instances of power outages that resulted in the site coming offline. Normally, these outages would be minimized by the use of a generator used onsite at the data center once our UPS runs out, but something apparently happened on their end that we’ve never had satisfactorily explained.
Our trust in this data center was lost for two reasons: First, the incident happened multiple times and the time frame between each incident was enough that we believed the problems should have been diagnosed and addressed, but weren’t. Second, and more importantly, there was little communication explaining what happened and why it happened. And as you know, that’s just not how we run our business.
Ultimately, it is not fair for all Wufoo users to trust their business and the reliability of their forms to a data center we do not trust. It’s unfortunate because the data center has provided rock solid reliability up until these incidents, so the communication issues were a surprise to us. Rather than avoiding the problem and hoping it doesn’t happen again, we’re moving centers in hopes that our new relationship will instill new confidence.
Thanks for all of your support,
— The Wufoo Team
And we’re all done. Everything went over as planned and we actually finished a half hour ahead of schedule. Many thanks to Bitpusher for helping us make this an extremely smooth transition!
Good news, Comrades! If you’re on a Wufoo account with access to the File Upload field, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve increased the file storage limit across all paying plans.
Here’s a breakdown of what it was before to what it is now:
There you go. Enjoy!
We’ve been meaning to highlight this for awhile, but there’s this really great walkthrough by one of our favorite users out in Boston, Boris Masis, on how to integrate your Google Analytics tracking with Wufoo forms.
It’s a really great tutorial and the best part is that he included a nice screencast of the method to show everything step by step. If you’re wondering about the reason for the code acrobatics, it’s because we currently don’t allow JavaScript snippets on public forms for security reasons. However, we’re glad to see Boris show a safe and fairly painless work around to get the advanced tracking Google provides. Thanks Boris!
This week, we’re showing off some of the new features that are going to come out with our new Report Builder. We started off with an overview of the new control interface and yesterday talked a bit about the new widget settings. Today we’re going to be highlighting one particular widget that we spent a lot of time improving for the new system : line graphs.
We hate to admit it, but if you ever used line graphs on the old system, you probably know that it was basically just shy of terrible. The biggest problem was the lack of flexibility in regards to the X-axis. We didn’t let you specify how to handle that data over time and this made the graphs not very good. And so one thing you’ll notice when you create a line graph in the new Report Builder is that we’ve added an additional option called Date Range to help you choose the time scale you want your data based upon.
By default, this option is set to “All”, which means that it’ll look through the dataset (based on your Data Settings in Step 2) and graph all information that’s ever been collected for that field’s choice. We’ve also included a lot of other premade Date Range settings (ie. Today, This Week, Last 30 Days, etc.) that we thought would be useful for users wanting a relativistic look at their data from the present moment. And for power users that need absolute control, we also provided a way to graph a custom date range based on your own start and end dates.
One of things you’ll notice about our new graphs is that we automatically calculate and use the proper time scale for the X-axis of the graph based on the date range specified. So if you’re looking at data for a particular day, we’ll show you the data in regards to entries per hour or if you’re looking at data over several weeks, we’ll show you that data in regards to days.
We’ve spent a lot of time fine tuning the system for better line graphs and we think you’ll like not having to worry about all those little details.
The Wufoo Blog is the official online publication written by the developers of Wufoo about their online form builder, form-related technologies, and whatever else may fit their fancy—like robots.
