Respond To Your Best Leads Immediately With Form Activate and Wufoo Integration
By Chris Coyier · May 23rd, 2012
Let’s say you run a web development shop and you use a “Request for Proposal” Wufoo form that new potential clients fill out. Now say it’s a Sunday afternoon. You probably aren’t glued to your computer watching for new submissions to this form. They can wait until you go through them Monday morning. But say one request comes through for a huge client with a huge budget and a time sensitive project. You might not want to let that one linger.
With this new integration, your Wufoo form can send data to FormActivate which will determine the importance of this new lead and act accordingly. FormActivate will literally call you on the phone and read aloud the most relevant information from the form submission. Then you can decide what you want to do. Call them or text them back, send it to voicemail, or ignore it. Never miss a vitally important lead again!
To Use This Integration
You’ll need an account on Wufoo and an account on FormActivate. If you are looking to just test this out, Wufoo has free plans and FormActivate has a free 7-day trial.
Now you’ll need to either create a form on Wufoo for capturing leads, identify one of your already-created forms you want to connect to FormActivate, or add one to your account from our gallery.
Then follow the written instructions here. This will guide you through the integration steps on FormActivate. Or for the more visually inclined, here’s a video walkthrough:
Big thanks to Brad Slavin and the whole team at Form Activate for working on this integration. This integration uses WebHooks, one of the many ways to integrate with Wufoo. If you are interested in integrating your web app with Wufoo, check out our Ultimate Guide for Integrating with Wufoo.
Keep Track of your Contacts with KarmaCRM and Wufoo
By Chris Coyier · May 22nd, 2012
KarmaCRM is a Customer Relationship Management web app that will help you keep all your sales leads and contacts “neat and tidy”. Wufoo users will feel right at home in KarmaCRM, with its bright and fun user interface. The idea is this: any Wufoo form you already use can be hooked up to your KarmaCRM account. New submissions to that form will be processed as normal here on Wufoo, but also pass that data to KarmaCRM, which will create a new contact for you there. Or, you could build a form specifically for capturing leads here on Wufoo and connect that.
To Use This Integration
You’ll need an account on Wufoo as well as an account on KarmaCRM. Both of our services have a free plan, if you would simply like to do some testing, as well as more robust paid plans.
Now you’ll need to either create a form on Wufoo for capturing leads, identify one of your already-created forms you want to connect to KarmaCRM, or add one to your account from our gallery.
Then follow KarmaCRM’s written instructions on how to complete the integration. Or for the more visually inclined, watch this video:
Big thanks to Gavin Thole and the whole team at KarmaCRM for their hard work on this integration! This integration uses WebHooks, one of the many ways to integrate with Wufoo. If you are interested in integrating your web app with Wufoo, check out our Ultimate Guide for Integrating with Wufoo.
Bring Your Wufoo Forms To Offline Mobile with Device Magic
By Chris Coyier · May 21st, 2012
Wufoo forms look and work great on mobile devices, but that device needs to have an internet connection if you want it to submit data. If you are in need of a way to use your Wufoo forms offline and have them submit that data later when the device is online, the new Device Magic integration may be the answer for you.
To use this integration:
You’ll need an account on Wufoo and an account on Device Magic. Both of our services have a free plan if you’d like to test it out.
Create a form on Wufoo or add one to your account from our gallery.
Follow this instructional video on how to integrate that form into your Device Magic account:
Thanks very much to the Device Magic team for their work on this integration! If you work on an app and would like to integrate it with Wufoo, check out our guide.
Save with Wufoo’s New Annual Plans
By Kevin Hale · May 14th, 2012
Hey, hey friends and friends of friends! Wufoo Team is checking in with some new plans for our devoted users who are in it with us for the long haul. On our plans and pricing page and under the Account Manager inside Wufoo, you can see that we’ve added a button to allow you to access our new annual plans!
Now you can conveniently pay for a year’s worth of service upfront and also save some money since the new annual plans offer a discount equivalent to about 3 months of service! So if you know that you’re going to need several forms active for a project for many, many months, then you’ll find these new annual plans to be budget friendly.
Many thanks to Chris Campbell and our brothers and sisters at SurveyMonkey for helping us rearchitect our billing system to accomodate these new annual plans. Please note that if you were manually setup on an annual plan by us in the past, there’s no need for you to make any changes. We’ll work with you and take of everything as you come up for renewal.
For users that want to or are currently being charged by invoice, we’re afraid these annual plans are just for users that are okay with being charged via credit card. Don’t worry, though. The ability to request invoice billing is the next phase in our billing improvements. Until then, happy form building!
The Current State of HTML5 Forms Updated
By Chris Coyier · April 11th, 2012About a year ago, Kevin and I attended SXSW to give a talk about HTML5 forms. Here at Wufoo, we closely watch the levels of browser support for HTML5 forms features so we can support them once they reach an acceptable level of maturity. Since we’ve done all that research, we thought why keep it to ourselves? I’m happy to announce that we’ve updated and redesigned all that original research and have it available for your reference.
Our support charts are now more readable and more specific about exactly what browsers support what features at what version. As soon as a browser lineage supports a feature, we color it green and mark the version. We’d like to see a field of solid green in the future!
We’ve also added Android to the charts. The default browser on Android devices is WebKit just like Mobile Safari on iOS, but there are differences in support levels. Documented support is based on the default browser that ships with the OS version (since it’s hard or impossible to update the browser without updating the OS).
Beyond generic value judgements of whether a browser supports the feature or not, we have a dedicated page for every single one of the individual features. For example, the progress element page shown above shows examples of the feature in use, the HTML syntax, browser support levels, screenshots of how it looks in supported and unsupported browsers, and a variety of notes regarding quirks on it’s usage.
We hope this resource is useful to you when working with your own forms outside of Wufoo. There is quite a bit of data here, so please forgive us if you find something amiss. We’d love it if you would report any errors.
Sign Up New Affiliates For Your Omnistar Affiliate Program Through Wufoo Forms
By Chris Coyier · April 10th, 2012
Let’s say you sell birthday cakes online. You make the best birthday cakes and do the best marketing you can. Your business is growing. But is it growing as fast as it would if you had hundreds of people making it their business to promote your birthday cakes like your own giant sales and marketing team? Probably not. That’s what online affiliate programs are all about. You offer a financial reward to people willing to promote your products for you. They earn money when they refer sales. Omnistar affiliate program software allows you to set that system up easily and all on the web.
Now with Omnistar’s new Wufoo integration, you can use Wufoo forms to sign up new affiliates to your affiliate program. You’ll get all the customizability, security, and power of Wufoo forms with the affiliate backend of Omnistar.
To Use This Integration
You’ll need an account on Wufoo as well as Omnistar. Wufoo has both free and paid plans this will work with. Omnistar’s plans start at $27/month, but have free trials if you’d like to try before you buy.
Create a signup form for new affiliates with Wufoo. Add any fields to capture the information you need from affiliates. Perhaps a membership form like this would be a good template.
Follow these instructions, or if you prefer, watch this video explaining the setup:
Thanks very much to Robert Kilonzo and the whole team at Omnistar for making this happen. They’re using Wufoo’s powerful WebHooks to send the data safely over to them for processing.
If you are a developer working on an app and have interest in integrating with Wufoo, make sure to check out our new Ultimate Guide for Integrating With Wufoo.
Keep Track of Incoming Contacts Through Wufoo’s New Nimble Integration
By Chris Coyier · March 23rd, 2012
Nimble is a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) web app. Among it’s great features is social integration, which gives you a deeper understanding of who your contacts are and the ability to keep an ear on social conversations. Another great feature is integration with Wufoo! As you know, Wufoo forms collect information which often includes personal information like names and emails. With the new integration between Nimble and Wufoo, submissions to Wufoo forms can send that data directly to Nimble, which will create a new contact and become part of your Nimble ecosystem.
How To Set Up This Integration
You’ll need an account on Wufoo as well as Nimble. The free plan on Nimble doesn’t allow 3rd party integrations, so you’ll need their Business plan, but that has a 30 day free trial if you want to just try it out.
Create a form on Wufoo that will capture the a new contact. Perhaps a lead generation form, contact form, or order form. Or, identify a form you’ve already created that you’d like to have it’s new submissions sent to Nimble.
Follow these instructions, or if you prefer, watch this video explaining the setup:
Thanks very much to Kristina Allen and the whole team at Nimble for making this happen. They’re using Wufoo’s powerful WebHooks API to send the data safely over to Nimble for processing.
If you are a developer working on an app and have interest in integrating with Wufoo, make sure to check out our new Ultimate Guide for Integrating With Wufoo.
The Ultimate Guide to Integrating with Wufoo
By Chris Coyier · March 21st, 2012
One of the coolest parts about Wufoo is that, as a data collection application, it makes a great middle man for other web apps. There are already loads of excellent integrations between Wufoo and other apps. Just take a look at our Partners page. That page isn’t an exclusive club where the only way on is by rubbing shoulders with Biz Dev folks or sucking up to founders. Absolutely any web app can build an integration with Wufoo, get onto our Partners page, and get whatever promotion we’re able to do. All you have to do is: do it. The following is a guide on how you might get started with the doing it.
What kind of integration is it?
We have lots of tools available to build your integration. The trick is knowing which ones to move forward with. There are three different ways to go, each suitable to different types of applications:
- Data APIs - Accessing data in user accounts that Wufoo has already been collected.
- Webhooks - Sending data that Wufoo forms collect to your app in real time.
- Form Embed Kit - Making it easier for your app’s users to embed Wufoo forms on pages they build with your app.
Let’s look at explanations, potential uses, app examples, and resources for each one. Then you can decide which one fits in best with your vision for you application and how it integrates with Wufoo.
Accessing Data in User Accounts (Wufoo Data API’s)
Over 500,000 Wufoo users create an average of 6 forms each, which means there are over 3 million Wufoo forms doing their thing. Each form contains about 10 fields and collects an average of 20 entries, so that means there are over 600 million unique bits of data that are accessible through our APIs. And that’s just form data. Through our Data API’s you can also access information about the forms themselves, the users of that account, reports they have built, and more.
Potential uses
- An app that would create ready-to-mail envelopes from collected address data
- A data-analysis app that gives you a quick demographic / social media snapshot of your respondents
Example app
The iPhone app PICO uses almost all of our data APIs. Instead of having to log into Wufoo.com to browse your forms, entries, users, and reports, you can use a native app (e.g. available on an App Store) that is specifically designed for mobile usability.
Resources
Your company’s development team will be able to get starting using our data APIs by reading and seeing the examples in the following documentation:
- Get a user’s forms
- Get a form’s fields
- Get a form’s entries (typically the most useful)
- Get an account’s users
- Get a user’s reports
- Get a reports widgets
- Get an entry or form’s comments
In order to use these, you a need a user’s API Key. One way to do that is simply to ask the user to provide that (findable within Wufoo’s Code Manager), but that’s a bit awkward. It is a much cleaner experience to use our Login API. That way a user can provide their Wufoo login credentials and we return you that API key which you can store and use as needed.
In order to use the Login API, you must apply for access. We need to track usage more closely on this particular API (and are excited to see what you are building with it!).
Sending Wufoo Data
It’s less common, but it’s worth noting that you can not only get data from Wufoo but send data to Wufoo. With our Entries API, you can submit an entry to a particular form.
By sending data to Wufoo, you get a lot of the great stuff Wufoo has to offer like robust notifications, data validation, reporting, and easily searchable entries. Not to mention the data will be stored forever on Wufoo’s secure servers.
An example app doing this is the Entries app for iPad.
API Wrappers
To facilitate working with these data APIs there are a number of “API Wrappers” that have been created by us and by the community. API Wrappers make working with the API’s easier because all the messy details of API interaction (like network requests and error handling) are tucked away in the wrapper, allowing you to focus on the important code that interacts with your app.
- PHP API Wrapper
- Python API Wrapper
- jQuery API Wrapper (For Ajax-y apps, uses PHP for the data call to keep API key safe)
- Java API Wrapper (Helpful for Android development)
- Ruby API Wrapper (uses HTTParty)
Sending Data To Your App as Soon As It’s Collected (WebHook Integration)
The most popular kind of integration with Wufoo utilizes our WebHook notifications. With a WebHook set up, a Wufoo form can send the data it collects instantly to anywhere on the web. This is great because it means a user gets to use a Wufoo form and get all the power of Wufoo and all the power of your app.
Potential uses
- Update status on a social network immediately based on information from a form submission
- Add a contact into your CRM when a lead generation form is submitted
Example apps
Here are two slightly different examples. The first gives the users information to set up the WebHook themselves through the Wufoo website. The second sets up the WebHook through API’s, so they never leave the application doing the integrating.
Email marketing service Active Campaign has an integration with Wufoo using WebHooks. From their application, they give users all the details they need to come over to Wufoo and add the WebHook notification manually.
Intelligent request management service Dispatch uses forms to collect “requests”. They offer their own forms, but through their Wufoo integration, you can use Wufoo forms as well. You set this up entirely from their app. They ask for their user’s Wufoo credentials (Login API) and then they are able to set up a Wufoo WebHook on any form the users chooses (WebHook API). Then they get the structure of the Wufoo form (Fields API) and have the user match up the data correctly so it all goes to the right place.
Both are neat. Dispatch’s integration is easier and cleaner for the user. The user never has to leave Dispatch.com and thus their experience is more linear and consistent. It also requires more work from a development standpoint as more APIs are involved.
Resources
The WebHook API works just like the data APIs. As long as you have a user’s API key (which you can either ask for or get via the Login API) you can insert new WebHooks onto any of their forms. You can also remove them.
WebHooks can also be added manually. From the Form Manager, click the Notification button beneath any form to go to the Notification Settings. From here you can add/edit/delete WebHooks. So your integration may just explain to users how to do this and provide them the details to insert here.
If a WebHooks is inserted through the API, it is still add/edit/delete-able through our web interface.
Making it Easier for your App’s Users to Embed Wufoo Forms (Wufoo Form Embed Kit)
Wufoo forms can be embedded on any website. In fact, more than half of all Wufoo form submissions come from embedded forms.
If your app helps people build their own website, it is likely that many of those people will want a form of some kind on their website. Thus, a great candidate for the Wufoo Form Embed Kit.
Rather than build your own form builder into your app (trust us, no trivial chore), you can use the Wufoo Form Embed Kit and allow people to insert Wufoo forms onto the pages they build. Your users never need to leave your website to insert a form and you don’t need to do much custom programming or design work.
The Wufoo Form Embed Kit is essentially a mini version of Wufoo which gets inserted onto your page in an iframe via provided JavaScript code. You can call and show this mini Wufoo at any time (likely in a popup). When a user selects a form to embed, we return that embed code to your page via a JavaScript callback. You then insert and save that data however you application normally does.
Potential uses
- CMS
- Blogging app
- Website Builder
- Social Network
- Media sharing site
- Any app where people build their own web page or have a public profile page.
Example app
YikeSite is a whitelabel CMS. You pay for it and set it up, then you resell it to your own clients for them to manage their own websites. Built right into YikeSite is the Wufoo Form Embed Kit. Here is how the flow works:
Resources
- PDF Explaining why the Form Embed Kit is awesome for your app
- Blog post with tutorial video on using the Form Embed Kit
- Developer documentation
- Simple live demo
Branding
If you build an integration with Wufoo that is in itself a named product, we just ask that you don’t use “Wufoo” in the name. As in, don’t call it “WufooMachine”. You could call it “WuMachine” or “Machinefoo” or just “Machine” if you wanted.
We also ask that you use our “Made for Wufoo” to show Wufoo branding, rather than our logo in any other context. You can download the Wufoo Logo Kit which has many options to choose from, including Photoshop files for customizing the color to exactly what you need. Here’s an example:
Any questions?
We’re stoked every time we hear about a new integration. Definitely let us know if you build one by filling out our Wufoo Wingman Application. This gives us all the information we need to help promote your app.
If you have any questions about Wufoo or how an integration might work, ask support, and they’ll get you routed to the right place.
Updated JavaScript Embed Snippet is Now Asynchronous and Makes Embedded Wufoo Forms Safer, Faster, Better
By Chris Coyier · March 7th, 2012We’ve pushed out an update to to the copy-and-paste code that you use to embed a Wufoo form on any website. This update to the JavaScript version of that snippet is a big improvement over what we were using before. Embedded forms using this new snipper will be safer, faster, and just plain better. That’s all you really need to know. For the techy-curious, we’ll go into each improvement in detail below.
Oh, and don’t worry about your currently embedded forms. Those will continue to work forever. But if you want the newfangled advantages, feel free to pull out your old embed code and replace it with the new code from the Code Manager.
Safer
Wufoo downtime is pretty rare, but like any web service, it does happen. In scheduled downtime, we display a friendly note about the form being temporarily unavailable. But in the extra-rare case of unscheduled downtime or slowness, there was a risk that your page would try to load resources from our servers and hang up waiting for them. Not any longer! The new snippet loads the Wufoo JavaScript asynchronously, which means your page will never wait around for it to load. It will continue loading your page normally.
Faster
Visitors to your page in modern browsers probably won’t notice much of an difference in speed, but if you have a large user base on older browsers (think Internet Explorer 7), they just might notice some faster speeds. With this new asynchronous snippet, not only will your page not be held up trying to load resources that may not be available, but it will load our JavaScript in parallel with other resources instead of blocking other downloads until it’s finished, which it does by default. This simultaneous downloading can result in noticeable decreases in page load time.
Better
The two reasons above certainly make things “better” already, but there is more!
The Wufoo form gets placed inside a
<div>element that you place on your page. The content inside this<div>is your fallback content. Should your Wufoo form not load for any reason, whatever content is inside that<div>will show instead. That’s much better than the old snippet, where nothing would show if something happened. By default, the content inside will show a link to your form hosted directly on Wufoo.comYou can now separate the JavaScript from where the form appears. Semantic HTML purists should be happy about this! No longer do you need to put the JavaScript exactly where you want the form to appear. The form will always appear with the
<div>that you copy from the snippet. If you wish, you could even move the JavaScript. If you want to keep it out of your HTML all together, you could even put our JavaScript portion right in your site’s own JavaScript file.
That’s the skinny on our new Async Embed Snippet. Hope you enjoy the update folks!
Add and Manage Your Contacts with Capsule CRM and Wufoo
By Chris Coyier · March 6th, 2012
Capsule is a CRM (Customer Relations Management) app that helps you stay organized with the hordes of people you’re working hard to establish strong relationships with online. Of course, Capsule is only as useful as the data it has to work with. One way to get data into Capsule is to enter it manually for each new person you interact with. Fortunately, for those you who’d like a less tedious method for getting that data, you can now integrate your Wufoo forms with their service and automatically have customers add their own data when they complete one of your fancy lead generation forms.
If you are interested in utilizing this really sweet integration, just follow these steps:
Making It Work
Create a form on Wufoo that will serve as the form you collect new customer information from. Perhaps a lead generation form, contact form, or order form. Or, identify a form you’ve already created that you’d like to have it’s new submissions sent to Capsule.
Follow the instructions here or watch the following video tutorial on how to set it up:
Thanks very much to Josef Szotten and the whole team at Capsule CRM for working on this integration! They’re using Wufoo’s powerful WebHooks API to send the data safely over to Capsule for processing.
