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Welcome to this week’s updates post!

Full-page vs. snippet HTML

First of all, we’d like to point out a feature of the new “My Forms” layout that you may not have noticed yet. On the “Publish” tab, if you decide to export your form’s HTML to use on your own site, you can now choose whether you want the HTML as a full page or as an HTML snippet.

Previously, only the snippet was available.  You may find the new full page HTML option useful  if you are not using a template or content management system and need a ready-to-use web page.

New address for forms hosted on FormAssembly

Early next week we’ll be changing the address for forms hosted on FormAssembly. Previously, if you chose to let FormAssembly host your forms, you had an address like this:

http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/1234

Now your form will be available at:

http://www.tfaforms.com/1234

Note that FormAssembly will continue to function for you as it always has. You do not need to do or change anything.  If you previously published, gave out, or linked to a form using the old address, that link will continue to work. Next week, we will simply start showing the shorter address by default.

We are making this change for two reasons. First, www.tfaforms.com/1234 is much shorter, easier to type, and easier to remember. We hope this helps you as you distribute links to your forms.

Secondly, by moving user-generated content to a different domain, we are following the recommendation of our annual security audit .  This increases the security of your account and keeps our partners happy (hint:  Salesforce’s certification team). If you’re interested in the technical details, we’d be happy to discuss this in the comments.

We hope you’re enjoying the changes we’ve made recently. If you’d like to comment on the new “My Forms” layout, please fill out our brief survey. As always, comments are welcome here, and at the UserVoice forum.

After last week’s update to the “My Forms” tab, some of you may be noticing that your page does not look anything like the screenshots posted here. If that is the case, you probably need to clear your browser’s cache. For example, you may be seeing something like this:

This is not how the new page should look. If you don’t know how to clear your cache, learn how here.

If you have comments you’d like to share about the new layout, please fill out our brief survey. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

This week’s major update should be pretty apparent to everyone, but we’ll go over it here to help you get acquainted. As you’ll see when you sign in to your FormAssembly account, we’ve completely redesigned the “My Forms” tab (if you’ve explored it a little and would like to comment on it, check out the survey here) .

You’ll see a new toolbar at the top of the application when you’re in the “My Forms” tab. This green bar now contains buttons for quickly and easily creating new forms, new forms from Salesforce, and new Workflows. When you select a form, the form’s title also appears here.

Although the Modify, Copy, and Delete buttons haven’t moved far, we hope you’ll find them easier to see and utilize. With the new layout, these buttons are located in the same top toolbar as the “New Form” button.

We also made some changes to the way your list of forms appears. You’ll find that the font size has increased, making titles easier to read. Instead of the three icons that used to be at the end of each row, you’ll now see a blue button. Clicking on this button reveals a menu of the most commonly used options for your forms. Options for viewing, publishing, and editing your form are available, as well as configuring, copying, archiving and deleting. In addition, we’ve created a “Recently Edited Form” space, so the form you worked on most recently is available quickly and without searching.

We hope you’ll like these changes, but as always we would appreciate your comments. Since this change affects everyone, we’ve created a survey so you can more easily share your reactions with us. Feel free to explore the new interface for awhile, and when you feel ready, check out the survey here. We’ll also post a site-wide announcement about the survey in a few days, once more people have experienced the new look.

Welcome to this week’s summary of FormAssembly updates. We’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work, but here are a few of the more visible updates we’ve made in the past week that we think you might be interested in.

Updates to PayPal Connector documentation

This week we posted documentation that should help you use PayPal with FormAssembly.com a little more easily. Here you can read about setting up the PayPal connector to work with your form, get an overview of the PayPal Purchasing Process, and find answers to the most common PayPal questions we encounter.

Coming Soon: Theme Editor

Providing you with a way to visually design your forms has been in the works for quite awhile, but we’ve made a significant progress lately on building a Theme Editor so you can modify your forms’ design without having to write CSS. The Theme Editor will allow you to modify almost all aspects of your forms’ visual design on the fly, and will also enable you to save themes for use on other forms.

For those of you who don’t want to mess with CSS styling, we think you’ll find this a useful and versatile tool. Below are a few preliminary screenshots. Some things may change, but the basic functionality should be set.

We love hearing your comments, so please leave them below or at the UserVoice forum.

Welcome to this week’s FormAssembly updates.

Form Builder Update

This week’s other big update is in the Form Builder. We’ve redesigned the buttons for selecting question types with the hope of making them easier to see and understand. Many users had particular questions about the file upload button, so we changed the icon to make this selection clearer. We also added labels to each answer type option for clarity’s sake.

New Answer Type Buttons

More HTTP POST Connector Updates

Expanding on last week’s improvements to the HTTP POST connector, this week we made that connector available in interactive mode. Previously, the connector could only be run in background mode, meaning that the result of the POST connector would never impact form submission or be available to the user. In contrast, interactive mode enables the connector to run before the user is redirected to the “Thank You” page. Submitted data can be shown to the user, either in an auto-responder email or on the “Thank You” page, and it can also be used in email notifications of submissions. To use the data from the POST connector in an auto-responder, email notification, or on the “Thank You” page, use the %%TFA_POST%% alias.

Coming Soon: New “My Forms” Page

We’re redesigning the “My Forms” tab to make it easier and faster to navigate through the different steps of creating and configuring your web forms.

The form you are currently working on will always be listed at the top of the list. You will also be able to open or collapse categories to keep your list to a manageable size, and you can conveniently access all the different configuration pages and actions from a drop-down menu. The drop down menu is located at the end of each row in the Active tab. From here you will be able to view, publish, edit, and configure your form, as well as copy it into the Form Builder, archive, or delete it. We hope this will streamline your use of FormAssembly and help you be more efficient.

We expect to release this update within the next week or so.

As always, we really appreciate your thoughts and comments. Feel free to leave comments below this post, and suggestions can be entered at the User Voice forum.

In an effort to keep you up-to-date and informed on what’s going on at FormAssembly, we’re going to start posting a summary of updates every week. For our first installment, here’s the rundown of what we’ve been doing around here this week.

Additional prefilling options including POST support
We’ve updated the form prefilling capabilities to be more robust and versatile. Most importantly, prefilling now supports POST requests. POST requests are useful when prefilling with a link parameter is not possible, such as when you have too much data or when you would like data to remain confidential. For more information on implementing POST requests for prefilling your forms, see the help documentation.

New Languages
Bahasa Melayu (Malay) and Lietuvių (Lithuanian) are now supported on FormAssembly.com. As always, we rely on your expertise to help translate FormAssembly and make it available for others around the world. If you are fluent in either of these languages, or any of the other languages supported on FormAssembly, you can contribute translations here.

Updated Documentation: Sorting exported data in Excel
If you’ve used repeated fields in your forms and then exported your data to Excel, you may have noticed that sorting (by last name, for example) causes all the repeated sections to appear together at the bottom of the spreadsheet. The relationship between the repeated rows and the “master” rows is lost, making the data difficult to use. While there is no perfect solution for this problem, we have documented a workaround that will enable you to use your data with minimal extra work. You can read about the workaround and watch a two minute screencast here.

“Fullscreen” in AppExchange
For AppExchange users, we’ve added a fullscreen link so that you can have more room to work on your forms from your Salesforce account. Simply click the link to open FormAssembly in a larger window. This will make your forms easier to use, edit, and view.

We hope you find some or all of these updates helpful. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Leave comments here, and make suggestions over at the UserVoice forum.