* Service from Infinity Box aims to make building forms less tedious
Building forms is easy enough but even so, at the best of times, it is usually a tedious task. Wufoo, a service published by Infinity Box, aims to change that.
After registering you can create forms using an AJAX-driven interface. The layout consists of a right hand form area and a tabbed left hand panel that allows you to add fields to the form area, edit the properties for each field, and edit the form properties. Rearranging the fields is simply a matter of dragging one field before or after another.
The one limitation of the user interface is that you can only order the fields in sequence from top to bottom, there’s no support for fields to the left or right.
You can create fields for single line text, paragraph text, multiple choice, checkboxes, drop downs, URLs, numeric, names, dates, time, phone numbers, currency, e-mail and file upload.
In the form properties you can set the form name; description; confirmation message (paid accounts can redirect the client to a URL when the form is submitted, free accounts are also shown ads on the confirmation page); have new entries e-mailed to any address you select; and (for paid accounts only) password protect the form. You can also see new form entries using a custom generated RSS feed for your form.
When you’re done and have saved the form, Wufoo allows you to start entering data into it; integrate the form into your own Web site or blog post (Wufoo provides a variety of code fragments for different implementations); go and build another form; return to the Form Manager; or return to editing the form you were working on.
[Cranky Reviewer Department: Wufoo is a little over-enthusiastic about the form creation process as the choices offered when you save the form are prefaced with “Awesome” – as if you had just climbed Anapurna. Is it just me being cranky or do a lot of these Web applications companies have an excess of zeal? What with them always being “teams” and exhorting you to “have fun” it feels way too damn happy.]
You can create your own theme for the form (this is really well thought out) and there’s also a tool that lets you create customer report layouts that include graphs generated from selected data fields. Fields can have validation and error checking and, as the owner of the form, you can see all data entered, and address data is automatically geo-located. You can also edit the entered data and create a comment for it.
For examples of possible forms click here and the FAQ can be found here.
Wufoo’s pricing ranges from free (which allows you a maximum of three forms with up to 10 fields each plus three reports and no more than 100 entries per month) to a basic account for $9 per month up to $199 per month. The more you pay the more entries per form and the more storage you get. At the higher subscription levels you also get SSL support.
Wufoo also offers an API for interacting with your form data remotely and the company has plans to make the Wufoo code available for installation on customers’ servers.
This is a really powerful service and for many companies provides not only a simple form generation and management solution but also makes data management cheap and effective.
