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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In addition to the new payment features, we are very excited to release a new version of Wufoo’s Entry Manager. It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up and we think it’s a winner. We always felt the old interface was more of a rough draft of how we wanted to have Wufoo help users explore and browse their collected data. We’ve been working on it for weeks bringing it in line programatically with our revised form builder. It’s brand new and with a lot of nice goodies, so please give it a run through and let us know if anything seems off. A complete list of upgrades and features can be found after the pic.

• Read Only View - While forms are great for entering data, they’re hardly the best for viewing it. The new entry manager now allows you to toggle between the old school editing mode and a new easier-on-the-eyes read only mode. All smart fields are displayed in a more convenient format and the underlying structures even use Microformats where appropriate (like names, addresses, links and files).

• Bulk Actions - In the Entry Manager you can now delete or export all entries in your form with a single click. Thanks to Bulk Actions in our new datagrid, you no longer need to create a separate report every time you need a custom set of data for Excel. Since it’s integrated into the revised datagrid, bulk actions can even be applied to just the filtered search results.

• Email and Print Entries - Thanks to the new Email and Print actions, you can now resend an entry to yourself (or anyone else) via email. This data comes in a new, styled email format that takes it’s cue from the new read-only view to help make things easier to process. Tested in all your favorite email programs (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail, Outlook), we think they look great. We’ve also adapted these styles for print, so you can now get your data out and styled in a similar, but printer-friendly analog format.

• Quicker Navigation - While you can still page through the grid and click on an entry to select it, we’ve also added a previous and next arrow for individual entries which will allow you to keep the mouse in one spot and just click to incrementally scan through your entries.

• Quick Search and Better Advanced Search - While the filter method was nice in the old Entry Manager, sometimes you just wanted to search things quickly and so we’ve added an easy no brainer search bar at the top of the grid that will search all fields for a matching term. If you click on the magnifier / up arrow, you’ll pull up an improved advanced search bar that will help you narrow search conditions at a more granular level. Filtering works the same as before, except now smart filters are applied based on the field type. For example, if you filter a number field, you can now select “Greater than,” “Less than,” or “Equals” as your conditions.

• Unique URL per Entry - Each entry now has a bookmarkable URL associated with it. This will allow you to save entries for later and jump straight to them without having to hunt for them in the grid.

• Improved File Handling - In the old Entry Manager, the file upload interface stored all attached entries in a module in the sidebar. It was sort of terrible and not intuitive. Thankfully, we’ve put the files where you’d probably expect them right there with the rest of the data, so you can properly associate which field the file belongs to. We’ve also added some nice new icons and additional data about each file when you view them.

• A More Intuitive Interface - For the most part, our primary goal for the Entry Manager redesign was to organize tasks and information into appropriate and relevant groups in the UI. The most common actions that you can perform when editing an entry are presented right there at the top. When you’re creating a new entry, everything is cleared out except for the task at hand and comments now have a more prominent role and position in the interface so discussions aren’t hidden from view. A lot of little touches went into this page and we hope you’ll have as much fun using it as we had building it.

After integrating PayPal into Wufoo, we got an overwhelming number of responses asking for more functionality and additional payment processors to be integrated into our platform. Based on this feedback, we’re happy to announce the addition of Google Checkout and Authorize.net to Wufoo’s payment systems. We’ve also jazzed up our current PayPal integration by adding the ability to create recurring subscriptions.

Google Checkout Integration

This was hands down the most highly requested feature addition to our payment system, and you’ll find that it’s probably the easiest way to hook up a form your Google Checkout account. To learn more about how to integrate your forms with Google Checkout, please check out our Google Checkout Documentation.

Authorize.net Integration

Authorize.net is a great alternative for those of you who need to process payments through your merchant account and cannot use services like Google Checkout or PayPal. This one tends to be for our non-profits and university institutions. It is a bit trickier to set up than the other two, but everything you need to know can be found in our Authorize.net Documentation.

PayPal Recurring Subscriptions

With our new recurring payment settings through PayPal, you can now charge subscriptions fees that automatically bill your users on a periodic basis. This is great for monthly and yearly services that you’ve processed with Wufoo. Just check off the “Recurring Billing” box in your payment settings and then choose how often you’d like your customers to be billed. To learn more about payment integration in general, a tutorial video and documentation can be found at http://wufoo.com/docs/payment-settings/.