One of the aspects we love about Wufoo is that it is easy to use. Any person of any skill level can come to the site, and have a form online within minutes. As many have noticed, simplicity comes at a price — lack of power. So, while it is our job to balance simplicity and power, we still wish we could help everyone out. We receive many specific, targeted feature request that we can’t always fulfill. With that in mind, we began making our API. Our goal with the API is to allow easy, flexible, programmatic access to your Wufoo account, so that any custom feature request you have can be achieved.

For the non techies, an API is just a simple programming interface that allows for querying, submitting to, and editing your Wufoo data. The nice part about an API is that it does not solely benefit programmers. At first, the API will not be of much use to non programmers. Over time, a community will evolve and examples will appear that begin to open things up. Before long, copying and pasting one line of code onto your site will open up a new world of Wufoo functionality. Here are a few examples of things that will be opened up:

• The ability to place a form on your site without an iframe. In fact, you will even be able to use your own markup if you desire.
• Show information submitted into your account on your own site without the need for reports.
• Further process your form submissions. After the data is sent to us, you will be able to run your own processing through it before the confirmation page is triggered.
• See the growth of plug and play widgets powered by Wufoo, such as polls, calendars, and file browsers.

The API will be a continuously expanding project, and we’re excited about the possibilities. For this first implementation, the API is still in testing mode. We would like to iron out any inconsistencies before releasing more power. This iteration contains the query API, which will allow you to browse through your Wufoo data and format it. For example, you could create export to XML in addition to the already existing Excel and CSV. In the near future we will release the reports and submit API’s, so stay tuned to the docs and forums because we will be adding examples and more functionality.

The start of the API also marks Wufoo version 1.1. Along with the API, key upgrades include more consistent exporting, duplicate and rename themes, and multiple field changes such as required, randomize, and default values on various fields. Check out the change log for more!

Over the last few days, we’ve been working with the good people over at Microsoft Research Asia (people who happen to also be fans of the Wu-Tang) to help them build an RSS Survey to collect information about how people are using RSS feeds.

There are a couple of interesting things they’re doing with this survey that we don’t see often enough from most corporate R&D. First, the survey is only 8 questions long. Second, they’re going to release the results to the public for anyone to use and analyze, which means if you’re in the business of dealing with RSS feeds you should definitely encourage people to take the time to fill it out.

One of things we really liked was how they’re using our File Upload field to have users anonymously submit copies of OPML files. We love that they were able to create an easy way of collecting a rich set of data from users without imposing a lot of hard work on the user’s end.

In addition to the survey, a couple of great features were added to Wufoo while working with them, the highlight being that you can now make Multiple Choice (radio) and Checkbox fields required. There’s a couple of more goodies on the way and we’ll be releasing a Change Log update of all the cool stuff soon.

UPDATE : They just released a translated version. You can now take the RSS survey in Chinese!