By Ryan Campbell · May 8th, 2008
User Management is officially live in Wufoo, and we say that with both excitement and relief. Emails containing feature requests come to us daily, and not surprisingly User Management has been the most requested feature. Whether it’s small businesses wanting individual logins for each user, large companies hoping to separate their account by divisions, or design shops looking for an easier way to set up an account to each of their clients — everyone had a need for User Management. With all of these use cases in mind, we have been working with a single focus to implement the feature in a way that we feel would be flexible, easy to use and priced fairly. User management is available to all $24/month Bona Fide accounts and higher.
Specifically, User Management allows for multiple email addresses to log in to the same account. Each email address, or user, can be assigned Create, View and Edit permissions on Forms, Themes and Reports. So if we want to create a user with access to only one form, and nothing else, we can do it. At the same time, it may not be desirable to micromanage every person and so keeping that in consideration, we have built in a few helpful features:
- By just checking off one box, you can flag a user as an Admin and grant them permissions to all resources.
- You can duplicate a user so that their permissions are easily carried over to a new user with similar access levels
- And whenever a user has permission to create something, they are automatically assigned permissions for that item, which prevents the Account Creator from having to go in and manually assign every item.
In addition to what’s mentioned here, you can read more about our User Management offering in our documentation. We’ve got big smiles on now that we’re finally able to show you our work, so check it out and please send us your feedback!
Posted in News & Updates | 14 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · March 25th, 2008
A common request in Wufoo is to send a user to a form with some of the data already filled in. Whether it’s a unique ID representing the user or their email and mailing address, anything that saves time and confusion increases the chance that a form gets filled out. Another use for this sort of functionality is to track a user. We recently found ourselves wanting to track what users were doing before they emailed support. Our goal was to find out if our new documentation was working and, more importantly, if users were even reaching the docs before they decided to contact us. It turns out that we were able to create all of the functionality we needed using Wufoo alone, so we would like to share our implementation process with you.
See it in Action
Before we go on and explain all of the small details, let’s take a look at the result this article produces. In order to understand the result, we need to go over a quick background. In Wufoo, there are two ways to contact support: a feedback form and a support request form. The feedback form is for sales questions, product feedback and general information. The support request form is for bugs or complications encountered when using the program. We designed support to make it easy to contact us, but we still want people to look at the documentation because we believe we have made the docs quick and helpful.
That said, we still didn’t want to force users with general questions to go through the documentation, so we have two links in every footer. To see if this approach was working, we started tracking which page people were viewing when they decided to use the feedback form. We know people are viewing our documentation when they use the support request form and ideally we would like people to be on our home page or marketing material when using the feedback form. Using only Wufoo forms and reports, we gathered these results.
Given this information, we can see that the feedback form is working as intended for the most part. There is still a decent amount of feedback coming from within the Wufoo admin interface that we would like to convert over to the support request form, but more than 80% of feedback seems to be submitted properly.
Implementation
While a tracking system seems quite complex, there are only a handful of steps needed to recreate what we’ve done:
- Create a Wufoo form.
- Populate the default values.
- Hide the tracking fields.
- Create a Wufoo report.
And of those steps, the only one that requires basic programming or work on your end is to populate the default values. You will have to supply the information that needs to be pre-filled in the form.
Creating a Wufoo Form
For this step, we’ll create a form inside of Wufoo. The one thing to make sure of is that a field is created to hold the tracking data. In the case of the example above, this will be a single line text to hold a word describing where the user came from. Later on we will hide this field, but for now it will be visible to everyone and the resulting form will appear similar to the one below.
Populate the Default Values
Now that we have a form, we will want to populate it with default values before the user begins filling it out. This is controlled through the URL of the form. The link that the user clicks on to go to the form will have the data in it, so that when the form loads the data can be place din the fields. We have full documentation on URL modifications that we can reference (the URL explains how to find the ID for each field), but for the example form we’re using, the format would be:
http://username.wufoo.com/forms/form-name/def/field2=home
Make sure that username is replaced with your Wufoo username and form-name is replaced with the name of the form. When the form loads, we will see the data already populated in the last field.
For those of you interested in more technical information, we wanted to show you the code snippet we use to determine what page the user was viewing before they clicked on the Feedback form. The URL above shows the word “home” hard coded, but we want to make this dynamic. To do this, we parse the URL that they are currently on with a little PHP script:
<?php
$url = "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$splits = explode('/', $url);
$category = 'home';
if($splits[3]) $category = $splits[3];
?>
We grab the URL, and we strip out the directory. For example, http://wufoo.com/gallery/ would place the word “gallery” into the form.
Hide the Tracking Fields
Since the data is laced into the field without the need for the user to type it in, there is no need for the user to see the field at all. Back in November, we added the ability to attach custom CSS class names to any field in a form. Using that feature, we’re going to attach the name of “hide” to the tracking field. In Wufoo, edit your form and the click on the field to bring up the field settings. Locate the setting that says Advanced CSS Layout Options, and type the word “hide” in there (without the double quotes). Save your form, and then go view the live version. The field should no longer be visible.
Create a Report
As people begin to fill out our form, we can analyze the data in a few ways. The easiest way is to click on Reports, and create a report with a pie chart. When we add a graph to the report, we use the tracking field as the field to graph, and then we can get a quick overview of the pages people were viewing prior to using the Feedback form.
The nice part of the default values feature is that it can be used in many ways. Creating a report is the easiest way to view your data, but there are definitely more powerful ways. For example, some of our users send a customer ID into their form. Then, on their own web site, they query their data by searching for the customer ID in the Query API. This allows them to then present the data back to the users on their own web site. But most importantly, it was a relief to find out that we could track custom data so easily.
Posted in Tips & Tricks | Post a Comment
By Ryan Campbell · February 27th, 2008
For the past few months we have been silently changing email notifications. The purpose of changing the emails was to make them more polished and up to the Wufoo standard without disrupting what our current users have become familiar with. The process we decided on was to make a template, and roll it out to 5,000 users. Then, based on feedback, revise the template and roll out to another 5,000. Rinse and repeat those steps until all users have seen the new template. The end result contains better looking emails, new features and a plain text option.
Feedback on the appearance of the emails was consistent on a few points. Below is a list of concerns, and how we modified the emails in response:
Smarter formatting of custom Wufoo fields: All fields now have the same formatting found in the entry manager. Unlike previous emails that just presented a list, the new format shows the data in context of the field type.
Preserve space: Certain fields are concatenated. For example, a Name field in the email will show “Ryan Campbell” all on the same line. Additionally, if a field was not filled out, it will not appear in the email. This makes brief glances at an email easier, and saves room for printing.
Improve readability: By placing a fixed width on the field names, the data submitted by the user always aligns making for an easier read. We also put logic to change the display of a paragraph text based on how many characters the user typed in.
Permalink to entries: Quickly editing an entry is desirable for some uses of Wufoo, but placing a permalink on every email didn’t work out. Too many people send out emails to different parties who don’t have login access, so the link was just wasted space and a distraction at the bottom of the email. The compromise we came to is that a permalink will be placed at the bottom of a notification if the email is sent to the Wufoo account holder, and there is no Reply To address set. So, if you use Wufoo for dialogue with your customers, there will be no permalink; however, when using by yourself for personal tracking, it will be present.
Along with feedback on the design of the new emails, a good amount of feature requests came in. Based on that feedback, we have added: custom notification settings to change the From Address and Message Subject, a templating system to allow for dynamic Messages Subjects, and the ability to change an email to plain text. We decided to offer a plain text version for those users who programmatically parse emails or who have an email client designed to support plain text. We’re happy and excited to have this ironed out and on the live servers, and we hope you like the changes.
Posted in News & Updates | 3 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · February 26th, 2008
This post is to inform you that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo this coming Saturday. The scheduled outage is:
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
7:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST
View All Timezones
While the scheduled time slot is one hour, we do want to alert you to the potential of delays. Wufoo is unique in the way that each account is isolated for security, which can cause unexpected behavior when performing updates. If this setup interferes with the work we will be performing Saturday, a full transfer to the new hardware must be done. This transfer would take approximately 5 hours. Our initial testing shows that we should be able to avoid this, but we want to give you the heads up to make you aware of everything going on.
The downtime is for the addition of hardware that will improve performance, stability and add enhancements to our backup procedures. 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. Please prepare your sites appropriately. Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to grow.
Posted in Maintenance | Post a Comment
By Kevin Hale · February 19th, 2008
Hi friends, we hope everyone had a swell round of holidays these last few weeks. As always, the Wufoo Team has been busy as beavers behind-the-scenes improving security, fixing bugs and writing code to scale our backend seamlessly with our rapidly growing community of users.
We’ve also rolled out an awesome set of upgrades to our interface that you may or may not have seen, but we’d like to introduce to you now!
Form Scheduling
If you’re running a contest or application based on a date schedule, you’ll love this. Under the Form Settings Tab, you can now specify start and end dates for your form to be active and accepting submissions. The form will then only be active during the dates specified and now you don’t have to wait up until midnight with your contest to make sure your form stops accepting submissions on your deadline.
Entry Limit
For those of using Wufoo for contests and applications that need to throttle their submissions to the first 100 entries, this feature is for you. Under the Form Settings Tab, you can now specify the maximum number of entries that your form can accept. Once you have reached that many entries, the form will stop accepting submissions.
Field Encryption
In an effort to bring more peace of mind to our users collecting sensitive data, we’ve provided an additional Ecryption setting for our Single Line Text fields.
Encrypted fields can only be read by a machine with a specific key and password that we keep hidden and protected, so if the data on our servers were to somehow be compromised it still couldn’t be read.
Why don’t we encrypt all data collected by Wufoo? Well, because it’s resource intensive and makes submitting and accessing data a lot slower. Additionally, the following limitations are in place on our system that applies specifically to encrypted fields:
- You are allowed a maximum of 5 encrypted fields per form.
- Once you encrypt a field, you cannot remove the encryption later.
- They are NOT sent in notification emails (because emails are not secure).
- They CANNOT be searched/filtered in the Entry Manager — only viewed.
Based on these limitations, it is important for you decide carefully which fields deserves encryption and to see if it’s worth the tradeoffs listed above. An example of a field deserving encryption would Social Security numbers and sensitive financial data like Bank Account numbers. Learn More about Encryption
Posted in News & Updates | 6 Comments
By Kevin Hale · February 19th, 2008
This one is for our power users out there who want to add a personal touch to their emails and confirmations coming from Wufoo. The Wufoo Templating API is a fancy way of instructing Wufoo to replace a phrase or template tag with the actual data that the user typed in.
Now you can insert the user’s name or information in a customized greeting after their data is submitted. This templating language can be used in the email notifications, confirmation message and confirmation emails. Learn more about the Template API
Posted in News & Updates | 1 Comment
By Kevin Hale · February 19th, 2008
Our customers on our higher end plans love our payment integration services. They think it’s the easiest way to collect donations, registrations and simple orders through merchants like PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net.
Currently, Wufoo’s payment integration interface is only available to our customers on the Bona Fide, Carpe Diem and Ad Infinitum plans. While we’ve tried to highlight the benefits and experience of this feature through documentation and a few videos, we think there’s nothing liking seeing and playing with the magic for yourself.
And so we’re happy to announce that our lower plans can now test drive Wufoo’s Payment Integration features for free for 5 transactions.
Just click on the “Payment” button under a form’s name in the Form Manager and you’ll be able to try out the interface. Note : the 5 free transactions is across all forms on your Wufoo account and NOT per form. We think that’s just enough play time to get a good idea of whether the feature will work for your payment processing needs.
Posted in News & Updates | 2 Comments
By Kevin Hale · February 19th, 2008
Here at Wufoo central, we subscribe to Kathy Sierra’s school of thought on making our documentation and manuals just as great for our existing users as the marketing materials we create for our potential users. And so in our never-ending quest to create some of the best documentation out there, we’d like to show off some great improvements and additions to the organization and structure of our support docs since our last major update last year.
Main Support Page
The new support page features clearly defined action items for getting help and a collection of the most frequently asked questions about Wufoo organized by application category.
Improved Organization
The individual documentation pages now present an individualized table of contents and a mini FAQ about features and actions for that aspect of Wufoo. These pages have also been designed to be more scannable with more illustrations, screenshots and even movies where necessary.
New Support Request Form
It was time to upgrade our old bug tracker and provide a more structured support request system so we can better track and assign your inquiries internally. And yes, that’s just a good ol’ Wufoo form.
Improved Search
Sometimes the best way to help our users is to provide the tools needed to help themselves. With a little help from Google Custom Search, you can now get better and faster search results from information contained in our support documentation and forums.
Posted in News & Updates | 1 Comment
By Kevin Hale · November 28th, 2007
Hey form lovers, we’ve got something really special for you today. One of the great visions we’ve always had for Wufoo is that it would be one of the best resources for helping web developers and designers create beautiful HTML form interfaces. We think everyone is entitled to this, even if they don’t use Wufoo to power their backend. And so it’s with great joy that the Wufoo Team unleashes upon the world the Wufoo Form Gallery.
The Gallery provides HTML templates and CSS themes created by the Wufoo Team with our innovative Form Builder and Theme Designer. We’re launching with over 40 templates and over 40 themes and have plans to add a whole lot more. The templates and themes are compatible so you can use them with each other to mix and match as you please.
HTML Template Gallery
CSS Theme Gallery
From the front page of the gallery, you’ll notice that we’ve divided it into two sections: HTML templates and CSS themes. The HTML template section is organized into 7 types (forms, surveys, invitations, etc.) and 5 categories (business, personal, education, etc.). All of the templates are tagged and so some of them overlap into different areas, but that should make it easier to browse and discover some interesting ideas to use with Wufoo. We’ve also implemented a quick search that should help as we add more and more templates.
In regards to the CSS theme section of the gallery, everything is pretty straightforward. See a swatch that you like and it’ll show you a live preview on the right. The current crop of CSS themes only differ by colors—thanks kuler and COLOURlovers!—but we do have some sweet ideas in the works to showcase some fancy stuff over the coming months.
Now, there’s two ways to use this gallery. You can either download a zip of the HTML markup and CSS files if you’re hardcore (you’ll still need to do all the leg work to connect it to your own database) or, if you have a Wufoo account, you can install them with a single click to use and customize right way to collect data and pretty up your existing forms. All themes and templates from the Wufoo Form Gallery are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so feel free to copy, distribute and adapt the themes and templates with abandon.
Regardless of how you use the Wufoo Form Gallery, we think it’ll be a great source of inspiration and a time saver for any developer or designer in need of putting something together quick. What’s exciting to us is that this is just the beginning. We have a lot of great ideas to make this one of the best resources out there and if you have any you’d like to share, please let us know.
Posted in News & Updates | 10 Comments
By Kevin Hale · November 15th, 2007
For our designers out there yearning for more layout flexibility in their forms, Team Wufoo is happy to announce two exciting features we’ve added to the Form Builder that should put a smile on your silly designer faces.
Label Alignment
Under the Form Settings tab, you’ll find a new drop down setting that will allow you to align your labels on top of your fields (Wufoo’s default) or to the left of them with left or right justified text. It’s a great way to save on vertical space and depending on how fast you want your users to process the fields (remember top aligned labels are the fastest), you can control the rate at which your users process those interface chunks. For more information about the ideas and rationale between the different label alignments in forms, check out Luke Wroblewski’s excellent article on Web Application Form Design.
This feature is made possible thanks to the results of some experiments we’ve conducted on Wufoo’s form markup and primary CSS for styling forms. This alignment change is actually being accomplished through a single classname change. That’s right, the markup stays exactly the same for all three label alignments, which is great for accessibility and our designers out there using Wufoo just for the XHTML/CSS markup. Man, isn’t CSS great?
Advanced CSS Layout Options
While this is a feature that’s been labeled “Advanced,” it’s really very easy to use and can be a potentially powerful tool in your Wufoo design arsenal. This field setting basically adds the classnames you specify to the parent element surrounding the label/field chunk you’ve selected. Obviously, classnames by themselves don’t do very much, but we’ve added some built in stylings into the Wufoo Form CSS that when called will provide some nice alternatives to the defaults we provide within Wufoo.
For example, if you wanted to have a field sit next to each other before we added this feature, it was a pretty complicated process that required a bit of CSS web design knowledge and usage of our advanced properties in the Theme Designer. Now, you can just add “leftHalf” and “rightHalf” to the appropriate fields that you want to sit next to each other and the Wufoo Form CSS will do all the rest.
Other useful classnames you can play with are “hide”, which makes that label and field hidden (useful for pre-populating information you already know about your users) and “altInstruct”, which makes the instructions for that field show beneath the field rather than as a pop up box on the side. We’ll be experimenting with and releasing more CSS alternatives as time goes on. Paired with the bring your own CSS feature in the Theme Designer, Advanced CSS Layout Options provides a lot of room to play for our web designers wanting more granular control over the look and feel of their Wufoo forms.
Note: This feature does NOT update live in the Form Builder. After you specify your classnames, just save the form and you’ll see the classes being applied to your live form and the form in the Entry Manager.
Posted in News & Updates | 8 Comments
