Web-form-buddy’s popular file upload option now comes with a built-in customizable progress bar. This displays real-time stats to your customer as they wait for their files to upload. Updating every second or two, it shows:

• A horizontal bar representing the progress of the file upload.
• The size of the selected file.
• The percentage completed.
• The estimated time remaining.

We think this is a cool feature that will impress your customers!

To configure the color and style settings for your progress bar, log in to Web-form-buddy and go to “global options” >> “color & style settings” >> “upload progress bar“.

Technically this feature has proved to be quite a challenge. It has involved working with Javascript and CSS in the browser, and Perl and Apache on the server. A true “Ajax” application!

Today we have added electronic funds transfer as a new payment method for both Web-form-buddy payment forms and the Web-store-buddy shopping cart.

The idea is that you can enter your bank account details on your control panel, and then if you enable this payment method your customer will be provided with bank transfer instructions. If you accept payments from abroad, there is an option to provide the special instructions that the bank may require for those (such as SWIFT code number or IBAN number).

One slight problem with electronic funds transfers is that unless your customer provides a unique reference number with the transaction, you may find it difficult to figure out who a payment is from. To prevent that from happening Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy advise your customer to quote the unique transaction reference with the payment.

We have just added support for drop-down menu fields with Web-form-buddy payment forms.

The idea behind payment forms is that you assign a price on your Web-form-buddy control panel to specific fields in your form.

In the case of text fields the purchaser can enter a quantity in the field and Web-form-buddy will multiply the price you have set for that field by the quantity entered.

In the case of  check boxes, radio buttons – and now drop-down lists too – the total price is calculated taking into account your customer’s choice from these field options.

Up until now, in a situation where you have several forms in one page, Web-form-buddy has asked you to use the “name” attribute of the form tag in order to distinguish one form from another. Like this:

<form name="xyz" method="post" action="your-script-name.cgi">

Well  this will still continue to work with your existing forms. But we have decided from now on to move over to using the form “id” attribute instead. Like this:

<form id="xyz" method="post" action="your-script-name.cgi">

There are two reasons for this:

1) In XHTML the “name” attribute is not supported. In particular we have discovered that the popular web editing tool Wordpress (with which I am writing this!)  makes it hard to use the “name” attribute with a form tag.

2) A nice feature of the ID attribute is that it is designed to provide a unique identity for an HTML element. A really good web authoring tool should make it impossible to create two HTML elements with the same ID attribute. The uniqueness of the ID attribute is why it is used in Javascript to access HTML entities. And that characteristic, of forcing a unique ID,  is exactly what Web-form-buddy is looking for when you have more than one form in a web page.

So we think it suits our purposes just nicely!

We are pleased to announce that Web-form-buddy now supports Google Checkout as an option for payment forms.

With Google Checkout folks can pay using the credit cards that they have setup in their Google account. Compared to many payment methods, Google Checkout offers the buyer a particularly fast, easy and comfortable payment method.

Signing up to become a Google Checkout merchant is very simple (and free!). Google Checkout will need to post a test transaction into your bank account – and that’s pretty much it:

http://checkout.google.com

Integration has proved to be quite tricky as Google have chosen to do things a little differently to most payment processors (such as PayPal). But now the hard work is all done and it’s working very well!

The next task is to enable Google Checkout for Web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application.

if you use Web-form-buddy for secure forms or archived forms, the data is available at our secure portal www.buddydata.com.

Likewise, if you use our Web-store-buddy search engine friendly shopping cart, your store orders are available from buddydata.com.

Up until now, the same password would grant access to the control panel and to buddydata.com. And that stays the same – your  primary password gets you into both locations.

What’s new is that we have added an option to create an additional password that grants access to buddydata only – not to the control panel. This means that access for administrative staff can be kept separate from webmaster access.

We have an additional payment method now for Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy :   payment by money order.

The next one we’ll be looking to add is Google Checkout.

Web-form-buddy has the option to serialize your forms. We’ve now added the ability to set the serial number to any value you choose.

If you use payment forms, Web-form-buddy also generates a unique, sequential order number for each payment. Now you can set or reset the order number at any time.

There are some occasions where it it might be appropriate to allow the person submitting the form to choose who will receive the form data. For example you might have a general inquiry form and it would be nice if your client could choose whether to send the inquiry to “sales“, “support” or “accounts” .

Now with Web-form-buddy this is easy – and, as is always the case with Web-form-buddy, you never have to add email addresses to your web pages where they can be harvested by spammers!

When you select “data options” and create or modify the list of recipients for your  form you will see the new option. If you enable runtime selection, then once the form data is completed Web-form-buddy will display a “secondary screen” to your web user which both provides a helpful summary of the form submission and allows them to pick the recipient (or several recipients if you choose the multiple selection option).

The Web-form-buddy “secondary screens” are 100% customizable and can even be embedded in one of your own web pages. (See “global options” >> “color & style settings“).

Web-form-buddy has a new feature that allows you to set a minimum payment amount for use with your payment forms.

You can use this feature if you have chosen the payment form option in which the total price is calculated from the choices made by your customer from your form. Or you can use it if you have selected the payment mode in which the customer enters the price to pay themselves (e.g. for donation forms).