Two months ago we rallied up beta testers for our new form builder, and thanks to all of our testers we are proud to see it go live today. All around the builder should feel more solid and responsive. Approximately 90% of the code has been rewritten from scratch. While all show stopping bugs should be gone, please let us know if something looks amiss. A list of all improvements are below, and we encourage suggestions for the future.

Interface Consistency

• Fields use the same markup as live forms, and render special text (such as HTML) accurately.
• Field Instructions now show in the builder.
• Color coordination and functional consistency have been added to the form and field properties.
• Improved Tooltips and smarter / dynamic help messages.

Drag & Drop Improvements

• Drag to add. You can now add a field anywhere to your form by dragging and dropping it into the preview.
• Drag and scroll. As you drag, the page will scroll with you if you have a longer form. This works for both adding and reordering.

Speed Improvements

• The page load time for editing forms with a large number of fields (over 20) has been cut down dramatically.
• The browser no longer chugs when working with 25+ choices for checkbox multiple choice fields.
• Drag and drop and field editing speed has been improved.

Other Improvements

• Warning prompt if you try to leave the builder without saving.
• Drop down fields can now be made required.
• Bulk add for drop down choices.
• Predefined values now show up as you edit in the form preview
• Smarter default naming (so adding a phone or address field automatically starts the label as Phone or Address in the Field’s title)
• Additional languages and a quick preview link to your Translate pages.
• Field title now allows for more text.
• Delete key no longer deletes choices.

Foundation for Improvement

While the powerhouse features aren’t in yet (mind you, the new rendering and performance improvements were no quick fix), the backend is now ready for them. Here are some of the ideas in the works.

• Min/Max ranges for numbers, characters, and words.
• Automated Start/End dates for publishing active forms.
• Encryption on certain fields.
• Hidden fields on public forms.
• Multiple label alignments
• New fields: likert, rich text, page break, and a few more surprises.

Since we introduced foreign language support in April, we’ve been working hard to make sure that Wufoo provides the best experience for our international users who like to publish their forms in a language other than English. More importantly, we’re committed to making these forms just as good as the English equivalent and not just some sub-par transformation. To help the cause, we’ve created an interface to make it easier to submit and manage translations in Wufoo.

We encourage everyone to take a look at our new translation preview to see the steps we’ve taken to make submitting and reviewing additional languages in Wufoo more efficient. At a glance, you can now see which languages we have, don’t have, and kinda-sorta have. New languages, corrections, and suggestions are easy to submit, and will be actively maintained by our team. Additionally, this page allows you to preview the error messages and labels your users will see if you decide to change the language setting of your form.

During our last update, all error messages were put up for translation. With this update, all subtitled text is now ready to be translated. This will allow you to have a field like “Name” now show with the appropriate foreign language equivalents for the “First” and “Last” labels that show beneath the field (pending translation, of course). With this conversion made to all smart fields, our public forms will be fully translatable.

Now that public facing forms are complete, the goal is to add more languages (we’d love to get Hindi and Japanese in there) and move on to providing additional hooks to other public areas of Wufoo, like reports. Thanks again to everyone who has submitted languages in the past, and to those of you who will add and make corrections in the future.