Hey everyone, we just wanted to let you know that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo’s infrastructure this coming Saturday, which will require us to take down the form processing servers. The scheduled outage is to happen on :

Saturday, September 27th, 2008
9pm PST / Midnight EST

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This will actually be the first phase of a two part upgrade we’re doing to improve the backend of Wufoo to better handle our current rate of growth and to anticipate future scaling needs. The second phase should take place some time in the next few weeks. During the downtime this Saturday, we’ll be adding some additional hardware that will improve our backup system and make it more robust. We’ll also be putting our new file system online which will improve our database access speeds.

Please note that while the system is unavailable, all Wufoo pages will show a maintenance screen, and public forms and reports will show a text message (black text on white background) explaining that the form is undergoing maintenance. Also, our mail servers will still be working and so you will be able to get a hold of us at support@wufoo.com.

Please prepare your sites appropriately and thanks again for bearing with us as we continue to grow.

Update : Many of you are asking about the length of the downtime. The honest answer is : it depends. The servers will be down for at least 10 minutes for the basic updates and config changes. After that, we will be trying something new and experimental. Basically, we plan to update each account one at a time, which will allow all other accounts to remain functional while one is being worked on. If this plan succeeds (and our testing so far shows that it will) then each account will only be down for about 30 seconds after that original 10 minutes. However, if our plan doesn’t work, all of Wufoo could be down from anywhere between 3 and 15 hours while we have to update everyone all at once. Our support line will be open, and we will get the blog up as soon as possible, so we will do or best to keep you updated on Saturday as soon as we know more.

Our latest update to Wufoo is dedicated to our beloved report junkies—those of you trying to get a better handle on understanding and representing the data collected by your forms. Last week, we pushed up a number improvements and optimizations to the way reports are displayed.

New Graphs

One thing you’ll probably notice is that we’ve replaced our graphing system with a shiny new one that’s got some sweet features that everyone should love. First of all, it’s very fast. On the old system, loading many graphs in a report resulted in pretty slow load and processing times and obviously that’s not an optimal experience. Thanks to optimizations we’ve made on the display engine, the new graphs load in a fraction of the time and without as much round-tripping to our servers. Good for us and great for you.

We were also able to implement a lot of nice details with the new graphing system.

• A cleaner look with a slightly better color palette.
• Tooltips that are more friendly and useful.
• Pie graphs now show the number of entries along with the percentage.
• Slices on a pie graph can be separated and highlighted with a click.
• Bar graphs are smarter. They’ll show more or less choices based on the size of the graph.
• The “Other” column is a consistent color that stands out from the other choices.

For those of you looking for some print capability in reports, you’ll be happy to know that you can now at least print the individual graphs. Just right-click on the graph you want to print to find the option.

Datagrid Tweaks

In addition to the new graphs, we implemented a few improvements in the datagrid that should make it friendlier and more flexible in a variety of situations. The rows are now zebra striped for better visual processing, the table headers won’t collapse into each other when you’ve selected a lot of columns to show, and we moved the green “Add Column” button out of the table header and into a container that surrounds the datagrid so that it’s in a fixed and more accessible space. This container around the datagrid was added to prevent the table from pushing and pulling your report layout out of shape. It’s very similar to what we did in the Entry Manager’s datagrid and we think you’ll like how smart it is, especially for users with large monitors.

Better Theme Integration

And since we believe wholeheartedly that making you look good ultimately makes us look good, we made reports a lot smarter about how they incorporate your themes into the display. The reports can now incorporate drop shadows properly and the graph titles and labels will match the colors you’ve specified for your Section and Field titles. One of the nice little details we implemented in reports is in regards to the grid lines in the graphs.

Using a contrast formula we’ve developed, Wufoo automatically determines and uses the appropriate color for the grid lines based on your background color for your theme. This way, the graphs are easy to read and follow even on a dark theme palette. It’s a small detail that we think makes a lot of difference.

Well that’s it for that. The new architecture we’ve developed for these changes is a lot more flexible for us on the backend and so we’re excited about the possibilities that this new foundation opens up for Wufoo Reporting. Anyway, all of these changes are available to all users on all plans and we hope they make your day.