Last night we went through a scheduled downtime that did not go as smoothly as planned. On Tuesday morning we received notice of the downtime from our datacenter and we sent out notification emails that day in order to provide as much notice as we could to our users. The maintenance was completely out of our hands, which is why we weren’t able to do this on a weekend. The third party insisted critical work was being performed, so we were given no say in the matter. The work was related to power outages, and they completed it in approximately an hour as they had predicted.

An issue occured, however, when Wufoo went back up with the way subdomains are resolved. Approximately an hour and a half after we came back up, we were notified that some accounts were not functioning properly because fo the subdomain issues. We were able to resolve the issue immediately and the servers became fully functional around 6am PST.

It seems that single points of failure continue to plague us when we experience downtime. As we did the last time we had an outage, we have scheduled time to sit down with our third party providers and figure out what steps need to be taken to avoid potential issues in the future. Our thanks go out to you for your understanding and patience as we continue to grow. We know many of you trust important parts of your businesses with us and we don’t take this responsibility lightly.

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.

Hello PayPal!

It’s no secret that our users want to attach the checkout process to their Wufoo form submissions. Hands down, with over 10,000 views, the most popular feature request to our team has been PayPal integration. The implementation challenge for us was a little tricky seeing that we wanted to implement it in a way that was both simple to understand and flexible for future upgrades. After months of development, we’ve come up with a solution that we’re quite proud of and are delighted to announce that you all can start making money today.

For those of you looking to jump right in, here’s what you need to know:

• PayPal integration is available for ($24) Bona Fide plans and higher.
• Just click on “Payment” in the Form Manager to get started.
• We’ve created a couple of Video Screencasts so you guys can see her in action—Thanks Mom! Intro to Payment Settings, Entry and Report Integration
• And we’ve provided some written documentation in case you need to study.

Once your form is payment enabled, all submissions will have the appropriate payment data associated with them. In the entry manager and in reports, you can view, filter, and graph the payment totals and easily see which payments are pending, paid and unpaid. You can even cross reference your PayPal account using the appropriate confirmation numbers. We’ve done our best to make the process as simple and seamless as we could imagine. We’re really excited about this feature and we can’t wait to develop it in the future. Please do try it out and tell us what you think.

The topic of IP addresses has been highly debated in the Wufoo headquarters. We have always collected them per submission for statistics and to limit one entry per user, but we have kept them away from your eyes so that they do not get abused. While not a huge security risk (since someone has to voluntarily fill out your form) we were leaning towards playing it safe. And then users began explaining their workflow, and how an IP address works similar to a digital signature by offering a way to locate where an entry came from. We’ve been working out a compromise to satisfy both thoughts.

IP addresses are currently tracked on public submissions. They are now available in the entry manager, reports, and exports, but come along with a few precautions. In the entry manager, you can see the address in the datagrid, and in a new section just underneath the datagrid. You can also filter by IP address. For reports, functionality is just the same except that the IP address is not a column that can be added/removed via the “+” in the top right hand of the datagrid. It has to be one of the columns showing on load to show in the report. This is to prevent users from unknowingly sharing every IP address on every public report.

Thanks for all of the feedback on the topic. We’re excited about the implementation, and about the new changes to the entry manager. Enjoy.

To prepare for new features such as paging, matrix fields, and PayPal integration, we had to restructure the backend of our form builder. During that process, we thought it would be nice to just go ahead and make a version 2 of the form builder while we were at it. So after some hefty performance increases, a few new features and a fresh look on the interface we have the next iteration of our form builder. Before we unleash it on everyone, we would like to do some thorough testing. That’s where you all come in — we need your help. If you would like to help us test out our new form builder, just fill out the form below:

https://master.wufoo.com/forms/form-builder-beta/

Invites will be sent out next Thursday. To satisfy everyones curiosity before then, here are two teaser screenshots to show a couple of the changes that have been made.

We’d like to take a minute to thank a few of our users for creating some great Wufoo screencasts and documentation. We really love this kind of stuff because it gives us a better view on how people are using Wufoo, and it helps us understand what we need to do a better job of explaining.

• Getting Started With Wufoo - Jeff Turner, from Activerain.com, created an awesome video overview on how to create a Wufoo form and add it to your website. We always love to hear user feedback, but when you can visually see how somebody interacts with an application, that oftentimes speaks louder than words.

• Creating a New Account - Tom, over at ScreencastCentral.com, created a short clip on how to sign up for a new Wufoo account. ScreencastCentral has hundreds of videos to “make using computers and software easier”. Tom also said there are a few more screencasts on Wufoo to come, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

• Hosting Wufoo Forms on Your Own Server - I honestly pretty tried hard to make the submit API documentation easy on the eyes and brain. That being said, I am a programmer, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t image what code, or Wufoo’s API looks like to a non-programmer. So I’d like to sincerely thank Dave Foy for writing a detailed tutorial on how to get started with the submit API. According to Dave, he “wanted to give a bit of a step-by-step walkthrough for the more, erm, programatically-challenged”. It’s definitely more in depth than my API introduction, and hopefully we’ll see some more programmatically-challenged people delve into the API.

Thanks to the hard work and great support of our community, the Wufoo system messages on public forms have been translated into 13 languages. As of today, you can log in, go to the form manager and select your desired language from the Form Properties menu. Changing the setting will cause error messages and password protection of public forms to appear in the selected language. The languages currently available are:

• Chinese - Simplified
• Chinese - Traditional
• Croatian
• Dutch
• English
• German
• Italian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

So, what’s next? We would like to continue to offer great support for internationalization. We’re working on a dynamic site that will reflect what languages we have, what we need, and offer the ability to make corrections. We’d also like to expand languages to all sub titles — for example, “State / Province / Region” in the address field. And once all of that is completed, who knows, maybe reports and other public facing pages will get an internationalization makeover.

In the meantime, please let us know if you see anything wrong with the current implementation, and feel free to submit new languages using the language template. Thanks again to all of our contributors.

Get updates about your form via cell phone.

We are stoked to announce a major upgrade to our Subscribe feature that will hopefully provide a more versatile solution to our users in regards to how they keep informed about what’s going on with their Wufoo form. In addition to being able to receive updates about new entries and comments via your email inbox and favorite feedreader, we now provide support for mobile devices, so you can get text message updates sent to your cell phone or PDA as soon as the data is collect by your forms.

To access these new features, just go to the Form Manager and click the Subscribe button. Because it was getting a little crowded in the Form Builder, we’ve pulled out the Email New Entries feature from the Form Properties tab and moved everything into what we think will be a more cohesive interface for getting notifications about new entries and new comments. We’re really excited about the possibilties of this new layout. We think it’s an easier way to set up notifications and a great way to integrate Wufoo into your mobile workflow.

Currently, we’re supporting text message updates to 7 carriers (AT&T, Boost, Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon) and we have plans to add more in the coming weeks as we make sure everything is working as it should. So please, get out there, try it out and tell us what you think.

Today we added the ability for you to track number of times that your form has been viewed in addition to the number of times that the form has been completed. To view these graphs, just head to the form manager section and click on the button labeled statistics. The tab marked ‘Today’ only shows the entries for the day, but the week, month, and year tabs display both the hits and views that your forms have received. We’re excited to get this out because part our long term strategy to help our users not only create forms, but to optimize their forms in order to receive a higher completion rate.

You may also notice that the appearance of the graphs are a little different than before. We weren’t entirely satisfied with the speed and flexibility that our old graphing tool provided, so we’re now moving over to FusionCharts. If you take a look at some of their examples, you’ll see that you can make some pretty sweet looking graphs with them. We’ll eventually be moving our reporting graphs over to FusionCharts in order to make those a little faster and better looking.