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.

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.

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.