Order forms for one-time payments like event registrations, product order forms, and other single transactions use the standard payment processing setup, but sometimes it’s necessary to create a repeating charge. Some examples of forms with recurring billing include subscription fees, membership renewals, or installment payments.

Setting up an online recurring order form is easy with Formsite and the payment integrations with PayPal and Authorize.net.

Controlling access to forms and results is essential for many form owners, and Formsite provides several places where authentication can be required. Password protection is the most common way to authenticate form visitors and result recipients.

Password-protecting the form is typically needed when access needs to be offered to a controlled group of visitors. A business employee form is one example where the results needs to be restricted to a specific group, and applying a password to the form is the fastest way to guarantee only qualified access.

Places where they are available are:

• Form password
• Save & Return
• Email secure link
• Reports password
• Require login to access files

Customizing the form text that isn't accessible in the Form Editor can help make a form easier to complete and understand. One example is setting custom text for the submit button from ‘Submit’ to ‘Complete Your Registration’, which can help keep form visitors informed of their progress.

Every form has its own separate page under the Form Settings -> Custom Text page, and editing the text and phrases there is an easy way to fine-tune the form. Whether fine-tuning includes a complete translation to another language or smaller customizations, the Custom Text page allows form builders to target form visitors with precise and clear text.

The kinds of information on the Custom Text page include text for:

• Buttons
• Messages & Errors
• Currency symbols
• Email labels
• Inventory labels

Formsite’s Custom Code item is used to add custom Javascript and HTML to a form for those times when extra code is needed that isn’t built into the form editor. The most common request is to add tracking code to get more information about how visitors use the form. Other uses include:

• Google Analytics & Facebook tracking
• Google Translate
• Custom Print button
• Embed videos
• Visitor referrer

We occasionally get questions asking how to change the alignment of the form from the default left-aligned to center-aligned or right-to-left (RTL). The form editor aligns the form items to the left normally but there are circumstances where form builders want to align the items to the center or the right.

• Center-aligned forms are most commonly requested when the form is embedded into the customer’s site where the design requires a center-aligned form.
• Right-aligned or RTL forms are commonly requested by customers needing a solution to display the form in a language that is read right-to-left.

Formsite order forms give form builders many powerful tools for accepting orders and payments. A feature of our system is the automatic Order Review page that is added to the end of every order form that displays the order details and the payment methods set up by the form owner.

The Order Review page is a common source of questions like:

• How do I modify the order summary table?
• Can I modify the order items and quantities?
• How do I add content to the order summary page?
• How do I skip the order summary page?

Piping is one of the most powerful tools available to form builders, as it allows for viewing and using form answers later in the form. The ability to collect and insert values into messages, other form fields, and file names lets form builders create dynamic systems for personalization and organization.

Formsite's methods for piping include features that allow form owners to target system data, set default text, and chain together multiple pipe codes to construct complex personalization or naming values.

The latest release includes enhanced features, new integrations, new templates, style updates, and more. The top enhancements include:

• Email Notification attachments
• New Google Drive & PayPal Payflow Pro integrations
• New medical templates
• Integrations & Payments styling

Some form owners have the need to collect uploaded files with their form results, as with registration forms, expense reports, contest entry forms, and many others. The File Upload item allows Formsite form builders to accept attachments with their forms. The most basic use of the item is easy to grasp, but there are some additional considerations and techniques that can be used to increase the usefulness of the File Upload item.

Formsite uses Amazon AWS to host our infrastructure and today they experienced an issue that caused widespread outages across multiple data centers. The AWS outage affected a large number of websites and online services, and the exact cause hasn’t yet been identified.

The architecture Formsite uses is spread across multiple data centers, but the issue impacted multiple data centers and made our outages unavoidable. The effects to Formsite included the inability to connect and log in to Formsite accounts, the inability to upload attachments to forms, and disruption of emails that may not have been delivered during the outage.

Important: The outage did not impact any saved data. Also, for those customers who were able to connect to forms and were able to successfully submit, the results were saved as normal. This outage affected the connections only—not the storage.

We will be evaluating what lessons we can learn and changes we can make to improve our communication during rare events like this. Today’s AWS outage was posted to our social channels at Facebook and Twitter, and our customer support staff stayed on point to communicate the status through the entire event.