Web-form-buddy‘s date validation & formatting for text fields is now more flexible. As well as creating templates for full dates (e.g. “mm-dd-yyyy“), you can now also create templates for partial dates such as month and year (e.g. “mm-yy“), or even just day of the month (“dd“).

To make  creating new forms on your web site as easy as possible,  we have added a new option “import settings from another form“. This feature allows you to copy settings from one form to another. You can choose to copy all settings, or just specific categories of settings – such as auto-responder settings, file upload settings, and so on.

A good way to get the most out of this feature is to create a “golden form” – i.e. one with all your favorite settings. Then after you create a new form, just import the settings from your golden form, and you’ll be pretty much good to go.

Web-form-buddy is a great productivity tool. It makes it really quick and easy to create and deploy forms on your web site. And now it just got even faster!

We have just launched a new option that allows you to configure the design of HTML formatted emails that Web-form-buddy sends out on your behalf. These include

• Autoresponder emails
• Payment receipts
• Form notifications

You can find this new option on your Web-form-buddy control panel under  “global options” >> “color & style settings” >> “HTML styled email“. There you can configure the color scheme, adjust the banner and frame border, set fonts and font sizes, and so on.

Although you have the option of using plain text formatted emails – it’s certainly a lot more impressive to send an attractively styled and formatted email, especially if it’s something your customers are going to see (such as a form auto-responder message or a payment receipt).

There are so many different ways that folks read their email these days. There’s regular desktop software applications such as Microsoft Outlook (and the various different versions in use),  Apple Mail,  Thunderbird,  Lotus Notes, and so on. Then there are webmail options such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And finally we have mobile applications such as BlackBerry, Android, iPad,  iPhone etc. etc..

It’s an unfortunate fact that not all of these email clients support the latest and best features of modern web page design – for example CSS layout without tables and  Javascript. But you’ll be pleased to know that we have created and tested  our configurable HTML email option to work consistently with all of these different ways of reading email!

Web-form-buddy has some new options for formatting form data. You can find these on your control panel at “global options” >> “data options”.

You can choose the symbol to use as a field/value data separator, choose a symbol for blank fields, set the font style and case for field names, and set the font style for field values.

Today we have added a new payment method for our Web-store-buddy shopping cart application and our Web-form-buddy payment forms application.

The new payment option is for payments “on account“. With this option your customer is asked to supply a purchase order number and the name of the purchasing organization when placing the order. If you wish you can choose to display a message such as  “This payment option is only available for approved accounts“.

We’ve added a new feature to Web-form-buddy that allows you to use Google Analytics to track your form submissions. In particular, if you use the “payment forms” option, you can track e-commerce data such as revenue, conversion rates, average order value, product performance, transactions, visits to purchase, days to purchase, and so forth.

To enable Google Analytics tracking, navigate to “global options” on your Web-form-buddy control panel.

Web-form-buddy has a number of options for including “real time” information with the data from your form submissions. For example, as well as the time and date of the form submission, you can obtain the user’s IP address.

Now we’ve taken that a step further, and Web-form-buddy can calculate the country from the IP address and include that in the form data if you wish.

This option is available from your form control panel if you select your form, then “configure” >> “data options” >> “real time data”.

We have now added more support for form submission tracking with Web-form-buddy.

In addition to the existing site submission number (select “global options” >> “serialization”), we have added an option for serialization on a per-form basis. This new option is available under the form setup menu (select “my forms” >> “configure” >> “setup” >> “auditing”).

Another new feature is that you can choose to include submission tracking as part of your form data set – which allows tab-delimited import of the serial number or and/or submission number into a spreadsheet or database. This can be switched on from the “real time data” form option.

Full details are available here:
http://www.web-form-buddy.com/html-wfb/form-submission-auditing.html

Webmasters all around the world use Web-form-buddy.  So we thought it would be a good idea to allow folks with non-English web sites to add their own translations of the various prompts & phrases displayed to form users. This is available now under “global options” >> “language settings“.

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!