Wufoo is hot. Seriously.

Posted 11 months ago in Everything else

Let's face it, building HTML forms and the processing behind them sucks. Alot. In fact, it sucks so much, that one group decided they'd build a product to help alleviate some of the pains of form building. And, well frankly, it rocks. It's Wufoo, and I have got to stop typing 'Wafoo'.

Generally speaking, Wufoo nails the administration of creating, managing and tracking basic to complex web-based forms. In my experience, the administration of these forms is where the general population of developers either forgot about or just plain didn't really care too much about. When I was at Sensis, building the forms consisted of the group telling me what fields and field types they wanted, and me building the forms by hand. Then, of course, followed the construction of processing and validation of form data. The only real parts we cared about were:

  • The actual fields of the form themselves, and how they're laid out
  • The reporting and management of the data after the form has been submitted

So there, I proved it to you. There just isn't enough emphasis on the management of the actual form itself after it's built.

Fortunately for Wufoo, they do it all well. They handle the management of form fields and layout, what to do with the data when the form is submitted, and some basic reporting and data management to summarize it all up. Did I mention it supports payment processing and has an API for developers (cha ching)?

The web app doesn't even warrant me explaining how to use it. Here, do this:

Go to website. Click 'Sign up for free'. Sign up for the 'Free' account. Then create your first form.

So why should an organization like ours, with many hundreds of possible forms, and hundreds of people who want to manage those forms themselves, be so interested in this app? It's not about developer laziness, it's about knowing where to draw the line between rewriting the wheel and not. The wheel's been written, and for multi-user, multi-form, non-centralized form management, it's at Wufoo.com.

1 Comment

[...] interactivity to a story or story package (assuming the CMS makes it possible). Nick writes about Wufoo here. time savedtime saved This entry was published on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is [...]

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