You might have noticed a few changes in the site in the last few days and in case you are wondering, here is the official notice of the latest updates.

Email Notification Customization

You can now customize the email notification that you receive each time a response to your web forms is submitted. This means you can translate it to your native language, you can remove the formassembly.com branding and you can also remove the submitted data from the notification. This last option is particularely important if you are collecting sensitive information that should not be transmitted over an insecure protocol like email.

At this time, the notification is still being sent from the ‘report@formassembly.com’ email address, but you can change the sender name. Support for a fully customizable address is coming soon. You may ask to be notified when this option is available.

RSS Feed password protection

You can now activate the password protection on your RSS feed. This is the default setting for new users. Password protection adds a layer of security to your data in case someone gains access to your RSS subscriptions (please note that the address of your feed cannot be otherwise guessed or inferred).

Miscellaneous

• Form Builder bug fix that prevented some conditional sections from showing when needed
• Site layout fixes in IE6 and IE7
• Email notifications now include by default the links to any uploaded files
• If you try to access a page in your account without being logged on, the login prompt will now redirect you to the desired page instead of the default form tab.

As always your feedback is appreciated. You can post a comment here or in the support forum.

What is a captcha?

A captcha is a test designed to distinguish between humans and computers. In its most common form, it consists of an image of distorted letters that must be identified. While this test is quite easy to pass for a human, it is extremely difficult to solve programmatically. This makes it a very effective way to prevent automated scripts (a.k.a bots) from performing actions that are only intended for humans. This includes blocking spammers from abusing web forms with their spam bots.

How to add a captcha to your web form

Form Assembly users ^* can now easily add a captcha to their web form by following these simple steps:

• Go to your form’s display and processing properties page.
• Under the ‘Display and Hosting options’ you will find the ‘Spam Filter’ option. Check the box and save your change.
• If you are hosting the form on your own website, you will need to follow the instructions to install the form again, otherwise you are all set.

If you are not (yet) using the Form Assembly and still want to use captchas, you should look into Ed Elliot’s Captcha generation class (for PHP). Our captcha functionality is based on this library. It is powerful and very easy to use.

A few things to consider before using captchas

• It is somewhat of an annoyance for legitimate users.
• The test might be hard or even impossible to pass for people who are visually impaired. The Form Assembly provides an audio alternative, but this can also be challenging for some.
• If you need to comply with regulations regarding people with disabilities (such as section 508 for federal agencies in the US), you should not use captchas.

For the reasons mentioned above, it is best to not use captchas unless you are actively targeted by spammers or have another legitimate reason to do so.

If you have any comments or suggestions regarding this feature, please post it below, or in the support forum.

(*) Note: This service is not available on the free plan.

captcha, web forms, spam control

You may have noticed a small change in the Form Builder this week. You can now use 11 different styles for your web forms. A new stylesheet was kindly contributed by Patrick McNeil from Design Meltdown. The other additions are simple variations on the existing styles.

Here are some examples:

• “Black” theme with left aligned labels.
• “Black (alt)” theme with labels on top.
• “Bureaucrat (tooltip)” theme. To see the tooltip, click on the email field.

This update is a transition step toward a more flexible tool to manage the look&feel of your web forms. This tool will be available in the next release of the Form Builder later this year.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions or problems with the look of your web forms. If you would like to contribute a stylesheet, please visit the Form Garden.

Create your Web Form

For the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to use a template from the Form Library.

Make sure you are logged on and have subscribed to the Form Assembly Professional plan ^*.

If you are familiar with the Form Builder, you can customize the form now, otherwise simply move on to step 2.

On this page, you can review the different setup options or keep the defaults for now. You can always change them later.

Salesforce Connector Setup

You first need to select which type of access you will want us to use to insert leads in your Salesforce application.

API setup

This applies if you have selected the ‘API’ connector type.

Step 5. Enter a valid Salesforce username and password.

You can use one of your existing Salesforce account, but it is preferable that you create a specific ‘API’ account and restrict its access rights to the lead object only (for instructions on how to do that, please refer to the Salesforce documentation).

Step 6. Press the ‘continue’ button. If the connection is successful you will be presented with the field mapping section.

Web-To-Lead setup

This applies if you have selected the ‘web-to-lead’ connector type.

Step 5a. Go to your Salesforce account and generate the default web-to-lead form.

Step 5b. Copy the HTML and simply paste it in the box provided.

Step 6. Press ‘continue’.

You do not need to do anything else with this HTML. The Form Assembly will automatically extract the information needed.

Field Mapping

Now your form is ready and the connection with Salesforce is working. You need to specify which field of your form corresponds to which field in Salesforce.

Here is more information on how to map your form fields.

How to Handle Picklists

Some Salesforce fields have a predefined list of values, or picklist. For instance, the picklist for Salutation contains ‘Mr.’, ‘Ms.’, ‘Mrs.’, ‘Dr.’, etc… If you match a multiple-choice question with a picklist, you can specify what choice corresponds to what item in the picklist. Most of the time, the labels will be identical, but that is not necessary.

How to Merge Fields

You can merge several of your form fields in one Salesforce field. For instance, if you had three fields for the phone number (US format (555) 555-5555), you would map all of them to the ‘phone’ field in Salesforce.

How to Use Conditional Sections

The form used in this tutorial contains a ‘other / please specify’ combo (in the product interest question). This allows the respondent to provide a free text answer when none of the predefined choices is relevant.

To map those fields correctly, first map the multiple-choice question to the Salesforce picklist (here product interest). Map each available choice, except the ‘other’, which remains ‘not exported’. Then move on to the next question - ‘please specify’ - and map it to the same Salesforce field (’product interest’).

That’s it! Feel free to post your comments below.

Salesforce, Web-to-Lead, Web Forms

Salesforce has provided for quite some time a tool called ‘web-to-lead’. It generates a simple contact form that you can place on your site to capture data about potential customers - or leads in marketing terminology.

The Form Assembly now offers a great alternative. You can design your form with the Form Builder and each submitted response will automatically create a lead in your Salesforce application.

I put together a sample form that illustrates some of the benefits our service offers:

Salesforce Web-to-Lead example.

This form uses two important features:

• A repeateable section to capture several phone numbers.
• A “other/please specify” combo in the “product interest” question, using a conditional trigger.

Of course, you benefit from our other services as well: RSS feed, spam control, input validation and many more…

If you would like to test the Web-To-Lead connector, email me your username (create an account if necessary). This service is free for the duration of the beta test.

Salesforce, web-to-lead, form builder

June has been mostly about behind the scenes work, but there are few things brewing at the Form Assembly that deserve a public announcement. So, here you go:

Coming up in July,

• Integration with third-party services, starting with Salesforce.com. This will allow you to turn your Form Assembly web form into an automated lead generation tool. This will roll out as a private beta first, so if you would like to try this feature, email me or drop a comment here.
• A Wordpress 2.0 widget, to easily add a web form to your Wordpress blog.
• New CSS stylesheets and a new layout option to display field hints as a contextual pop-up (a.k.a. tool-tip).
  

If you have any comments, feel free to post here or in the forums.

Thank you.

widget, form builder, salesforce

With a very simple setup, you can now use the email notification you receive to reply directly to the person who submitted the response.

First make sure that your form actually asks for an email address, and that this question has a validation of type ‘email’ (this can be done in the Form Builder).

Then, in the form properties page, in the ‘upon response’ section, set the reply-to option. The drop-down menu will list the form fields of type ‘email’. Choose the appropriate one and save.

That’s it. On your next email, you’ll be able to hit ‘reply’. The email used will be the one posted by the respondent (if you see ‘report @ formassembly . com’ instead, your setup is probably not right).

The server migration went well and everything should be running smoothly. There are a few minor issues that will addressed throughout the day, but should you run into any problems, please email us or post in the support forums.

Thank you.

In order to improve the reliability and quality of our service, we will be transferring the site to a new server this Saturday (june 10th) at 10PM EST (Sunday 3AM GMT).

• formassembly.com will be unavailable for about 30mn.
• Web forms hosted on the Form Assembly will not be available during that period.
• Forms hosted on your own site will continue to function. Response processing will not be interrupted.
• The Time-Tracker application will also be offline during the operation.

If you have any problems with the site after 11PM EST (4AM GMT), please email us.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Cedric Savarese
The Form Assembly

In the form builder, a section is the basic layout tool. It allows you to group related questions (short for input field and label) and display them in a specific way. For instance, a section of type ‘fieldset’ shows a border around its content.

Version 2.3 of the builder introduces two new types of sections: inline and table row. They allow you to alter the default ‘one field per line’ layout.

All the questions (fields+labels) placed inside an inline section are displayed on the same line.

Inline Layout

Inside a table row section, fields appear in their own cell. Labels are shown in the column header and they are not repeated if you have more than one row. The title for the row (left-most column) is the name given to the table-row section.

Table Layout

Duplicate section link

To quickly add rows to your table, copy your first table-row section using the ‘duplicate section’ link (in the section properties panel).

Here are a couple of examples preloaded in the Form Builder:

• Table layout
• Inline layout

web development, web forms