We’re Hitting The Road Again for BarCamp Tour 2012!

Last year we got together with some of our best friends and helped out nine different BarCamps all across the United States. We did whatever we could to help make the event as great as possible, from throwing the pre or after parties, to helping out with things on the day of the event, to giving talks ourselves on our own areas of expertise.

This year we’re doing it again! Together with MailChimp, BatchBook, and Grasshopper we are: BarCamp Tour 2012!

Never heard of a BarCamp? They call themselves the “unconference”. Instead of expensive conferences with exclusive speakers, BarCamps are typically free to attend and the speakers are the attendees themselves! At the beginning of the day, people post what they’d like to do a session about on a big gridded board. Attendees visit the board to see what sessions they’d like to attend at any given time. Sessions are usually loosely centered around technology.

Can we help your community’s BarCamp?

Since BarCamps are free or very inexpensive to attend, the organizers usually wrassle up community support and rely on sponsors to help make things happen with a small budget. That’s where we can come in! If you are organizing your community’s BarCamp we can help you with whatever you need the most. Just head on over to the 2012 BarCamp Tour website and fill out the form. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can about what we can do.

Hope to see you on the road

Keep an eye on the site. We’ll be updating it with the schedule for what cities we’ll be at and when. We’d very much love to see you there!

Posted in News & Updates | 1 Comment

Holy Fiesta! Bienvenido Wufoo Español!

We are excited to announce that after months of listening to tapes and practicing with flashcards, Wufoo is now bilingual! If you look at the footer, you’ll see a new dropdown that will allow you to access Wufoo Español, a Spanish version of our site and app!

Just to be clear, while the forms you built in Wufoo have been available to your users in 46 different languages for awhile now, our marketing, support and application was all only available to English speaking users up until yesterday. With the addition of Wufoo Español and a dedicated support team to deliver the same level of service many of you have come to expect, we’re delighted to be able to open up Wufoo properly to our Spanish speaking friends.

To access Wufoo Español, it’s really easy. If you live in a Spanish speaking country or your system is setup to be localized in Spanish, we will do our best to automatically detect your preference and redirect you appropriately. Otherwise, you can always flip the switch using the Preferred Language dropdown at the bottom of the site.

And for those of you worried about the essence of Wufoo being lost in translation, I can assure you that we spent a lot of work to make sure it’s just as much fun in Español as it is in English. For example, instead of our beloved Shakespeare quotes, you’ll see some choice lines from Don Quixote!

Currently, Wufoo Español is located on the Mexican domain name at wufoo.com.mx, however, we do have plans to roll out additional localized versions for Spain and Argentia.

Another thing to be aware of is that the prices on our plans are still in U.S. dollars. We just want you all to know that we are planning and actively working on offering our services in the appropriate foreign currencies as well. Be patient, and we’ll be sure to let you know when we can offer plans in your preferred denominations.

Obviously, a conversion like this could not have been pulled off so well and so quickly without a lot of talented people helping us out. While every member of the Wufoo Team needed to be involved in making Wufoo Español possible, the mastermind and architect behind our engineering transformation was done by our very own Alex Vaquez. He pretty much worked in a hole for several months all by himself to turn our PHP straw into language gold. I owe him a lot of fried ice cream for his fine work.

This is our second major collaboration with our friends on the SurveyMonkey International Team. It’s been a real delight to work with all of them on this little fiesta and so shout outs go out to Helga Wissenbach and Minna King for guiding us on our international journey.

We also want to thank Mark Elkin, Conny Hayes, Andrew Saxe and David Kim over at Smartling for helping us adapt what is a truly amazing technology. Wufoo Español would have been so much less without their involvement. High fives go out to Clover van Steenberghe, Hiroko McCoy and their army of very patient translators at ABLE for taking the time to help us translate what I do not doubt, were some very strange references and quirks.

Our ability to provide support natively in Spanish is made possible by Heather Shoemaker over at LinguistNow, who developed the technology to help us translate our documentation, and Alex Lemuz, who was graciously lent to us by SurveyMonkey to provide Wufoo support to our new Spanish users. Lemuz, along with Isabelle Galdamez also spent a lot time helping us test and identify any holes we missed as we worked through this translation.

Thanks again to anyone we might have missed here. Obviously, this is just the beginning of our international journey. Now that we’ve laid down the foundation, we’ll be hard at work bringing into the world versions of Wufoo in many other languages.

Posted in News & Updates | 5 Comments

Automatically Rate the Quality of your Incoming Leads with InboundScore’s Wufoo Integration

Wufoo forms are really great at collecting leads and letting you know when they come in via our real time notification system. However, the hard work often starts after collection when you have to go through them one by one and prioritize which leads deserve your time and resources first.

Thankfully, our new integration with InboundScore will help make this process or triaging leads a lot easier. You can now have lots of really valuable additional information appended to Wufoo leads with publicly available information gathered from the great wide Internet automatically. With InboundScore, you can have social media profiles, job titles, bios and even insight and analysis on whether the lead is a potential decision maker at their organization attached to the data collected by Wufoo.

Making it Work

1. Make sure you have the essentials. You’ll need a Wufoo account and an InboundScore account.

2. Create a new lead generation form in Wufoo, or pick one you’ve already built that you want to integrate with InboundScore.

3. Follow this video tutorial on setting up the integration:

For more detailed written instructions, you can check out this tutorial on the integration. Once the integration is set up and you’ve gotten some leads, you’ll be able to see them in your InboundScore account. You can then rate your leads by sorting the table according to their InboundScore:

Thanks to Joe Fahrner and the InboundScore team for working on this integration and making it available to our users! This integration uses Wufoo’s powerful WebHooks API for passing the data between the two services.

Posted in Integrations | 2 Comments

Wufoo Forms Now More Small Screen Friendly

There is no doubt people are using the web more and more on devices with smaller screens than you have at home on your desk, on your laptop, or even your “tablet” device. Wufoo forms already look great on the iPhone, but now we’ve recently pushed out some changes that make Wufoo forms work better on any small screen.

Hosted Wufoo Forms

For forms directly on wufoo.com, they have an appropriately sized fixed with:

But that fixed size didn’t suit small screens very well. Now we’ve tweaked things so that on smaller screens, the form simply utilizes all available width, without the spacing and background. Here’s a Wufoo form on a Galaxy Nexus:

Sexy, eh?

Embedded Wufoo Forms

Forms that you embed onto your own sites have always worked pretty well across different available widths. They simply fit snuggly into whatever horizontal space is available.

There was one little hiccup though, and that’s if the screen was resized after the page had loaded. If the screen became narrower, there was a chance that text on the form would wrap, pushing things down and sometimes, sadly, hiding the form’s vital “Submit” button.

We’ve fixed this issue, and the iframe that contains the Wufoo form will resize to the appropriate height, and the submit button will always be safely visible!

If you’d like to see this in action, visit this page and resize your browser window.

Remember, you can control the CSS!

You are ultimately in control of how your form looks. For those of you with some CSS skills, you can apply custom CSS to your form. If you have specific needs for how you’d like your form to look on screens of different sizes, you can apply responsive design techniques through your custom CSS to control that.

Posted in News & Updates | 4 Comments

Wufoo gets a New Wardrobe and a Form Builder Demo

Hey, hey, hey digital monsters! Over the weekend, we pushed out our second major redesign of the Wufoo website. There’s still a few pages that need to be converted to the new look, but we thought it would be okay to share what we have so far. You can get a good feel for the bright and shiny from our homepage and by exploring most of the links from there.

In addition to updating the aesthetic to a more contemporary look (our little login t-rex got a nice upgrade!), the new design gives us a lot more flexibility to experiment with how we visually communicate the value of Wufoo to our newest users and fans. The foundation actually sits on top of a pretty cool responsive grid system that we designed in house, which means it should look pretty good on whatever screen is front of you. And don’t worry, while we did pack it with a ton of HTML5 and CSS3 goodness, we want you to know that increased clarity was our primary objective. Here’s a few of the things we did towards that goal:

• Built a modular slideshow system to communicate news and features much easier on any landing page.
• Designed a sticky table of contents to help users deep link and navigate the content on any landing page.
• We put our new promotional video at center stage on the home and features pages.
• Revamped our Features page away from being checklist oriented and focus on highlighting how our UI benefits users directly in plain English.

Try the Form Builder Demo!

One of the new toys that comes with this redesign is the ability to play with Wufoo’s Form Builder without having to create an account. Now, you can play around with or show off how easy it is to use Wufoo without having to login or fill out a bunch of registration fields. And if you like what you see, you can easily save the work and we’ll guide you into account creation when you’re ready.

Since we’ve always been dedicated to good type design around here (our last design actually featured a font we heavily customized that’s no longer in production and therefore was unique only to our site), we were delighted to be able to use one of our favorite integration parters, Typekit, to help deliver the typographic magic. One of the nice side effects of this change is we’re not communicating text in images anymore, which is going to make it a lot easier for us to finish up our international versions of Wufoo that we’ve been furiously putting the final touches on.

Think of it as a Preview

Currently, the redesign is limited to just the marketing stuff on the site, so you won’t see anything new when you login…yet. But I want you to know that we’re definitely planning to migrate both the feel and a lot of the lessons we learned over to the application side of things in the near future. Until then, we’ll be rolling out this bad boy to our other marketing pages, blog and documentation over the next few weeks. We’re really proud of new look and hope you guys enjoy all the little touches we put into it. Please do look around and let us know what you think.

Posted in News & Updates | 14 Comments

Quick Tip: How to Remove the Default Choice from a Multiple Choice Field

When you add a multiple choice field to a form, by default, the first choice is selected. You may or may not want that for your field on your form. You can select a different default option by clicking the radio button next to a different choice, or turn off the default choice entirely by clicking the active radio button.

Note that without a default choice, no answer is still a valid choice by the user unless you specifically mark the field as required. Also note turning on and off defaults works the same way with checkbox fields.

Here’s a quick video demo:

Thanks to Eric Hansen for the idea on this quick tip!

Posted in News & Updates | 4 Comments

Manage Fundraising and Donors with Little Green Light and Wufoo

Little Green Light is a web-based software tool built for people who do fundraising from individuals. It helps you with the big picture like managing donor lists and segements, reviewing your progress, and scheduling events. They even handle the smaller details like updating individual donor information and recording the results of a phone call.

Wufoo is all about making collecting information easier, faster, and fun through web forms. Now with the new Little Green Light and Wufoo integration, you can build your forms with Wufoo and send the information they collect over to your Little Green Light account. This works by “mapping” the fields on your Wufoo form over to where you want the data to go to in Little Green Light.

Learn how to set up this integration.

In order to use this integration, you’ll need an account on Little Green Light as well as an account on Wufoo. For the watch and learn types, here’s a video tutorial:

Thanks to Nick Bicknell and his team over at Little Green Light for creating and supporting this integration!

We love to see integrations like this that are built to work seamlessly completely from the the integrating application. In this case, it was all done through use of our Login API, Forms API, Fields API, and WebHook API. Fancy stuff.

Posted in News & Updates | 4 Comments

Quick Tip: How to Export All Your Data from a Form

You can export every single entry your Wufoo form has collected in one file. Perhaps you’ve run up against your maximum number of forms on your level of account and need to remove one to make room for another, but want to back up that data. Or say you are a spreadsheet wizard and want to do some fancy calculations with the data from there. Or perhaps you need a CSV file so you can move the form from one account to another. Well, here are the steps:

1. Click the Entries button underneath the form you want to export from the Form Manager. This will take you to the Entry Manager.
   
   

2. Click the Bulk Actions link to bring up the mass delete and export options.
   
   

3. Click the Export button.
   
   

4. Choose your file format preference: Excel (.xls), Tabs (.txt), or Commas (.csv)
   
   

And that’s it. Here’s a quick video demo showing it all in action:

Posted in News & Updates | 4 Comments

Embed Wufoo Forms on Facebook Pages with our New App

Sweet succulent social media! It’s been a long time coming, but our team has finally put the finishing touches on our very own Wufoo Facebook App. Now, you can easily add a form to your Facebook page and easily collect information and leads from your fans. Here’s how it’ll look on Facebook:

To install the Wufoo Facebook App and get your Wufoo Form embedded on your Facebook Page, simple click the “Code” button beneath any form from the Form Manger, click the “On Facebook” tab, and click the “Add To Your Page” button. This will bring up a popup window to select which page you’d like to add it to. Select which page and add it, then head back to that page and click the newly-added “Wufoo Form!” tab to select which form you’d like to embed.

Screencast

Here’s a screencast showing how it all goes down:

Requirements

To integrate Wufoo on to your Facebook page, you’ll need the following:

• You’ll need a Facebook account.
• You’ll need a Wufoo account.
• You’ll need to create (or already have) a Facebook Page.
• You’ll need to install the Wufoo App (see above)

Please note that you can only have one Wufoo App installed per Facebook Page, which means you can only associate one form with your Facebook Page.

After you install the Wufoo App to your Facebook page, you’ll see a prompt to login to your Wufoo account to access the forms you’ve created on Wufoo. If you’re already logged into Wufoo, you’ll just go straight to a list of your forms. One of the really cool things about this integration is that from Facebook, you’ll be able to access a mini Form Manager that’ll make you feel right at home to those familiar with our interface.

One thing some of you will notice is that the embedded forms on Facebook do not show the Form Title or Form Description from your Wufoo form. This is because Facebook already provides a place for a header for the tab. To change that tab’s name, just follow these instructions for renaming the Wufoo App’s tab title. If you need provide a description or instruction to your users at the top of the form, just use a Section Break at the top of the form in the Form Builder.

Thanks a lot for everyone’s patience and testing while we worked out all the kinks. We’re really happy with how everything turned out and hope you all will enjoy collecting data from your favorite social circles!

Posted in News & Updates | 30 Comments

How to Create and Grade Quizzes using Wufoo, Python and Django

This is a tutorial from guest blogger Robert Graham. He wrote a very cool bit of software on the Django framework for Python that is able to grade quizzes that are built from Wufoo forms. This tutorial is a bit more technical than what we usually serve up here, so if you’re a casual user, be prepared for hardcore code action.

Basic Features

This software (“wufoo_quizzes”) is able to extend the functionality of Wufoo by turning survey-like forms you build with Wufoo into quizzes that are graded. The user completing the quiz gets an email of their results or a certificate if they “pass” and the admin can get an email of the complete results of the quiz as a CSV file.

Dependencies

1. Server running Python
2. The Wufoo API Wrapper for Python : pyfoo
3. python-dateutil - pip install python-dateutil
4. django - pip install django

Step 1) Have a Wufoo Account & Create a Quiz

First, you’ll need a Wufoo account and a survey to use. The example I have tested this module with is about WWII history. Each quiz you use with this module will need a Name and Email field. Quiz questions are multiple choice fields, so they have one correct answer.

Go ahead. Make your Wufoo quiz. I’ll wait. If you just want to follow along with this tutorial exactly, we put this exact quiz into the Wufoo Template Gallery.

Just click the Add to Wufoo button and it will be added to your Wufoo account.

Step 2) Environment Setup

Now you need to prep a place to run the quiz grader from. Let’s make a virtualenv for that. Why, you ask? David Fischer makes it clear:

If you develop a Python module and you don’t test it with virtualenv, don’t make your next release until you do.

Virtualenv creates a Python environment that is segregated from your system wide Python installation. In this way, you can test your module without any external packages mucking up the result, add different versions of dependency packages and generally verify the exact set of requirements for your package.

If you don’t have virtualenv:

pip install virtualenv

Environment setup:

virtualenv --no-site-packages grader
source ./grader/bin/activate
pip install python-dateutils
pip install django

This prepares a Python environment that does not connect to your local root site-packages for dependencies and installs two of the three dependencies for this project into it. Now, download the code for wufoo_quizzes if you have not already. Unzip that in your choice location. Finally, we download our last dependency, pyfoo, which allows us to talk to the Wufoo API from Python. Unzip the .zip file you download from GitHub, then place pyfoo.py and the scripts folder into the same directory that contains quizgrader.py from wufoo_quizzes.

Step 3) Quiz Answers and Settings

Edit the answers.txt file in the wufoo_quizzes folder to contain the name of your quiz followed by new lines in a question: answer format.

Example:

WWII History Quiz
Which country or countries benefitted from the Lend Lease Pact?: Both
Which is a German field commander who fought a brilliant campaign on the Eastern front?: Manstein
When did the Allies break out of Normandy?: August 1944

You can place more quizzes in this answers file like so:

WWII History Quiz
Which country or countries benefitted from the Lend Lease Pact?: Both
Which is a German field commander who fought a brilliant campaign on the Eastern front?: Manstein
When did the Allies break out of Normandy?: August 1944

Other Quiz Name
Question 1: True
Question 2: False
Question 3: Honey Badger
Question 4: Vegas, Baby!

Make sure the question and answer text exactly matches what is on your Wufoo form. I copied and pasted mine directly from Wufoo after finishing the form.

You will also need to configure settings by creating a file named ‘locals.py’ in the same directory as quizgrader.py from wufoo_quizzes. You can copy and paste what you’ll need from quizgrader.py or the example setup below:

email_password = 'pw'
api_key = 'APIKEY'
wufoo_account = 'account' # this is the 'youraccount' part of youraccount.wufoo.com
smtp_host = 'smtp.gmail.com'
email_user = 'you@example.com'
templates = ('/your/path/to/this/project/', '/your/path/to/the/template/dir')
admin_email = 'admin@example.com'
admin_email_subject = 'Quiz Results'
success_message_text_alt = "This is an text only alternative message for those users pass the quiz"
required_score = 80.0 # 80% to pass
send_user_emails = False
send_admin_email = True

• Please note that the email_password is the password for your email_user on your smtp_host.

• api_key is the Wufoo API key from your Wufoo account’s API page.

• wufoo_account is the subdomain piece in ‘wufoo_account.wufoo.com’ which you can see when logged into Wufoo.

• The templates setting tells quizgrader.py where to find the template files that are included in the template directory. You can move those around if you like, but I had to give the directory of wufoo_quizzes and the templates directory to make sure Django could find the templates.

• admin_email is the email address that will receive the results from the grading in a CSV with the subject line of admin_email_subject.

• success_message_text_alt allows you to specify a text only message for user emails that pass the quiz. The default template for success is an HTML email which may not work in all email clients.

• required_score is the score threshold for pass/fail on your quizzes.

• send_user_emails and send_admin_email lets you specify if you want the system to send emails at all. All results are printed to stdout if not.

Step 4) Time to Take Over the World

Run the grader, receive emails, change your life! (Make sure you activate the virtualenv as above first.)

python path/to/quizgrader.py

You should see something akin to:

GreenEyedDevil:rgraham-wufoo-quizzes-tip rgraham$ python quizgrader.py 
WWII History Quiz Scores:
guy@example.com scored 0.00 percent on WWII History Quiz.
rgraham@example.com scored 100.00 percent on WWII History Quiz.
Sending failure message to: guy@example.com
Sending certificate to: rgraham@example.com

Users who fail the quiz will get a text email from the template failure.txt like this:

Users who pass the quiz will get an HTML email from the template certificate.html like this:

The admin will get a text email from the template weekly-email.txt like this:

The templates used to send emails are examples that you are welcome to use, but you may wish to include your own information in them. These templates use the Django template system and are easily modified to suit your purposes. Large changes, like what data is dynamically included in the templates will require you to modify the code, but any static changes can be made as easily as changing any text file.

Step 5) Extra Credit

Setup this script to run using cron. If you’d like to get results only from the last week, you can make some small changes to quizgrader.py to make that happen. Uncomment the if statement where you see (2 locations):

# FIXME make the date specifiable
#if datetime.datetime.strptime(entry[date_created.ID], "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") > (datetime.datetime.now() + relativedelta(weeks=-1)):

Changes weeks=-1 to whatever date range you have in mind. weeks=-2 for the last two weeks of results. days=-1 for the last 24 hours of results. You will probably connect this interval to your cron interval.

Disclaimer

This is a pretty light weight solution that is not suitable for extremely high traffic forms, but it might be just right for you or give you a starting point for building something more robust.

Questions?

You can also email me with requests or issues. I’ll do all I can to help. Thanks for following along and good luck quizzing!

Robert Graham is a developer, software entrepreneur, and consultant who maintains a blog about the experience. Robert has been working in software since 2005. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google. Someday he’d like to work for himself.

Posted in News & Updates | 2 Comments