The Small Green Tree Blog

If you use web forms with file uploads, we’re pleased to announce some new features!

• Web-form-buddy now supports multiple file attachments.
• As before, you can choose whether a file upload is optional or required. But in addition, you can set a number for how many files are required.
• You can set a size limit independently for the maximum size of any one attachment as well as the maximum size for all the upload files taken together. Previously the maximum upload size was 5Mb - that has been increased to 10Mb.
• You can set a limit on the number of file uploads (from 1 to 10).

The Web-form-buddy payment forms option , allows you to hook up your form to PayPal or WorldPay so as to take a payment.

Up until now the description of the purchase displayed at PayPal or Worldpay was just “goods”. Now however you can set up a custom text description of up to 65 characters. And that can be a little more informative and descriptive for your customers!

We have just added a new option to Web-form-buddy that allows you to set the time and date reporting to exactly match your own time zone. This new feature is available under “global options”.

Web-form-buddy’s script URLs have changed! (Although the old ones will continue to work just fine, so there’s no need to update your web pages unless you want to).

Up until now, our script URLs always took this form:

http://www.smallgreentree.net/cgi-bin/forms etc etc , or
https://www.smallgreentree.net/cgi-bin/forms etc etc (for secure forms)

What we have done is get rid of our domain in the URL (smallgreentree.net) and replace it with a subdomain (created from your domain) followed by a “generic” script domain. Like this:

http://yourdomain.cgi-data.com/webform/ etc etc , or
https://yourdomain.cgi-data.com/webform/ etc etc etc etc (for secure forms)

We hope you will find this new arrangement much more consistent with your web site (in the past customers might have wondered “who is smallgreentree.net?“!).

Web-form-buddy can send out two types of email on your behalf: The autoresponder email and the payment receipt email.

Web-form-buddy allows you to set the reply address for those emails. But up until now you could only select that reply address from those individuals that you have configured to receive the form data.

Now however you can choose anyone from your contacts database as the reply address. That gives you greater flexibility. So, for example, you could choose to have the form data sent to the admin department of your company. Then you could set your autoresponder reply address to your sales department, and that way your sales people could field inquiries coming in from folks that read your autoresponder message.

We have just launched a new feature - date field validation

This allows you to set up a date format template for a field e.g.

• mm-dd-yyyy
• yy:mm:dd
• ddmmyyyy

The input data will then be validated and formatted to the template.

There are a number of options with Web-form-buddy that involve the use of built-in “secondary“screens. E.g.:

• The data confirmation screen (with or without CAPTCHA)
• The file file upload screen for forms that accept file attachments
• The screens for payment forms - the order confirmation screen and the check and credit card payment screens.

Under “global options” it is now possible to completely configure the color scheme of these secondary schemes to match your web site.

But wait, there’s more…

You can if you wish completely embed the content of these secondary screens within a page on your web site. This works by publishing a page to your web site that Web-form-buddy will reference as a template page. Using this technique any secondary screens that are displayed by Web-form-buddy will blend seamlessly with the form on your web site.

This fits in with the guiding principle of Web-form-buddy: - You take care of the design; Web-form-buddy provides the engine!

In your web form, those fields that are not set as “required fields” may or may not be completed by the web user.

 What to do with those blank fields?

Previously Web-form-buddy would include the field in the form data list, but with the “~” character to signify the field was blank. This might look like so:

Name ~ Peter Smith
Email ~ peter@gmail..com
Address ~ ~
City ~~
Country ~ USA

In this case, the “City” & “Country” fields are blank fields.

Now we’ve added the option for Web-form-buddy to suppress blank fields if you prefer.  Using the same example, you would now receive data like this:

Name ~ Peter Smith
Email ~ peter@gmail..com
Country ~ USA

To select this option just navigate to the form’s “data options” settings.

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new file upload option for Web-form-buddy.

As usual with Web-form-buddy, you have no special coding to do or software to install. Just select the file upload option for your form using your control panel and - heh presto! - you’re done.

You can limit the size of the file upload you will accept and you can define the types of file that can be uploaded (e.g. you could limit the file types to image files of the type .jpg, .gif, or .png). You can also choose whether to offer the file upload as required or just optional.

Web-form-buddy now has a new option to display a summary of the form data to the user with a “confirm” or “cancel” button.

This is a nice thing to do - especially if your form is quite complex. It also has the benefit of offering you some protection against automated form submissions (spam).

If you find you are getting a lot of spam form submissions, you can also supplement the data confirmation screen with a “CAPTCHA” test. There are three options to choose from:

• Standard Captcha: There are some slightly distorted letters that you have to type in a box.
• The Carnegie Mellon University “ReCaptcha” Test: This works in a similar way, but the results contribute towards the task of archiving human knowledge by digitizing books (info)
• Simple Math Captcha: Instead of a slightly distorted image, the form submitter is asked to answer a simple question. E.g “What is one plus three?”

To access the new option from your control panel, first select a form, then select “form options“