We have starting using the form software, WuFoo, to develop some forms for our site. As WuFoo deals with integrating data on the web and building front ends, we thought this would be applicable for this blog. So the next few posts will deal with WuFoo.

To begin, WuFoo does the backend work allowing you to develop forms within their online form development site.

This is perfect for us, because we don’t code, but even if we did, we doubt we could come anywhere close to the forms that WuFoo makes, and they offer 10 forms for just $10 per month. We want to create forms to:

1. Setup the payment to Paypal
2. Obtain information from customers related to their orders. (our service requires input from users in order to customize what we give back to customers)

After we sign up for a trial account, we are sent a link in the mail. This link takes us to the dashboard or control panel.

Our first step is to try to figure out how to use this panel.

This video helps us get up to speed http://s3.amazonaws.com/wufoo-videos/getstart1.mov

The administration panel is very easy to use. Many different field types can be inserted and moved. We learned that fields could be easily copied, which is a real time saver. Here is an example of the initial state of our first form.

Another issue to consider is the sequence. We are taking visitors from WordPress, to a WuFoo Form, then to PayPal, to a WordPress Thank You page, and finally to WuFoo again to fill in this form so we can complete this order. So the workflow looks like this.

We use a delayed redirect from the Thank You page to the Entry Form. This is because the Thank You page has a Google Analytics code embedded in it to help us with web statistics. We don’t anticipate everyone being able to immediately fill in the information that is required for the Entry Form, so if they bookmark it and come back, we don’t want it clicking up the Google Analytics code. That code is used to track conversions. We use this delayed redirect code to do this, since our host does not have a delayed redirect feature in the hosting control panel.

We chose a 3 second redirect. Long enough to show the thank you message, but not so long as to allow the user to mistakenly close the browser.

Now we will create a new form by going to the Form Manager.

We can create the form with this control.

Here we have filled in the introductory part of the form.

We can edit each of the fields by selecting them and they highlight and open a control panel to the left, like so.

Now we can select our theme and add a custom theme. You can see we have already added a custom header.

We can go and apply this theme in the Form Manager.

After we are done, this is what our form looks like.

We will now fill in the sample form by going to the Form Manager and selecting entry.

This will take us to the entry manager.

Now we have created an entry.

Now we get a notification for the entry we just made.

Now we can go and look at our entry.

We can search through all the entries (we only have one right now)

We can also delete it.