Deftform Changelog

We somewhat quietly published our Stripe integration 2 days ago and it appears, some of our customers are already using it. So, here is the announcement post.

Stripe Payments v1 now available

The first version of our Stripe implementation is now live. 🎉

We had a few variations built because the idea was to sell specific products that exist in your Stripe account. Some of those variations did not directly involve products, but only a specific amount of money that could be defined. But that was not what we were aiming for.

With our current integration, we make use of Stripe Checkout. This allows you to change a couple of things yourself within the Stripe dashboard (colors and fonts, for example). To better integrate the checkout flow with the form, we might revert to one of the previous variations in the future.

Note that this is a first version and we are open to feedback on how we can make it better for you (if you don't like it, that is).

Bug fixes

We also fixed a couple of bugs:

• Under certain circumstances, deleting an account was not possible when a specific setting in one of the forms was enabled. An error occurred that prevented the account from being deleted.
• When downloading PDFs for responses, labels in non-alphanumeric languages were not displayed correctly. Instead of showing the proper characters, the labels appeared as a series of question marks.
  
• Sometimes, responses were not synced to Google Sheets until after another response came in. All responses were eventually synced, but not always in order.
• We experienced a few issues recently with our automated SSL deployments. Custom domains were added, but SSL certificates were not. This has been resolved now and we manually issued certificates for the missing domains.

It is now possible to define a custom reply-to email address. This address will be used for all outgoing emails to form submitters if a form had a dedicated email field. You can read more about this here.

Please note that this is not the sender email address, but the reply-to address. We plan to offer an option to send emails from a custom SMPT provider of your choice later this year.

Also, if you specified an email field in the form (as mentioned in the first paragraph), and also enabled admin notifications via email, the reply-to address will be the one from the person submitting the form.

Form SEO options

We also added a couple of SEO related options to the form settings. There is now a new tab "SEO", where you can set a custom title, description, Open Graph image and also define if a form should be indexable by bots / search engines.

Minor additions and fixes

We also streamlined the UI a little bit and made sure that sections in settings had the same spacing from one another. It is now also possible to set the opacity for colors when using custom styles. Some of you wanted to have that option, now go nuts! :)

Today we added additional options for custom styles. It is now possible to center the logo, center the submit button and also expand the submit button to full width.

We also removed the default uppercase formatting for the submit button. You can simply customize the text yourself and make it uppercase, if needed.

It is now also possible to add more than one eSignature field to a form. And we added support to center text in the paragraph element, or even align it to the right, if you feel like it...

Apart from that, we also fixed a couple of bugs and UI glitches. Thanks for reporting.

You are now able to define custom texts for the file upload field. This can be done when creating or editing a file upload field.

Formatting options are limited to bold, italic and underline and you can only add up to 255 characters. You are not able to remove any of those lines, so by saving an empty value, it defaults to our texts.

We also improved the loading indicator a little bit. It was kind of broken before, because it jumped straight to 100%. It's not a progress bar anymore, but a spinner indicating that something is happening in the background.

This one has been requested a few times recently (kind of odd...) and we decided it's a nice addition:

You can now enable to auto-capture a submitter's location. Based in the IP address, we use the MaxMind database to determine the city and country of the person submitting a form. Due to proxies, VPN and other things, the location may not be fully accurate to the actual location.

Still, this may be useful to some of our customers (at least to those who asked for it). This option can be enabled in the form settings and is disabled by default.

Our math captcha stopped working for yet unknown reasons, but we were able to get it working again by adding a background (stupid, right?). The background will be removed again once this issue was fully fixed.

We also fixed 2 minor bugs that occurred when adding a custom domain with new-ish, fancy top-level domains. 

Google has approved our OAuth consent screen and we have now made this integration available to all our customers.

To get started, head over to the "Notifications / Connections" settings and connect to your Google account. Please make sure to accept every scope during authentication, so the integration works as it's supposed to. Those are all non-sensitive scopes – so don't worry, we have no access to any of your other files.

You can read more about our Google Sheets integration in our help center: help.deftform.com/integrations...

Today's update includes new field types, additional security, improvements and bug fixes. Let's dig in...

Two-factor authentication

To add an additional layer of security to your account while logging in, we added the possibility to enable 2FA. You will need an authenticator app like Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, or Google Authenticator to enable this for your account.

Check the account settings to enable 2FA.

New field types

We added 3 new field types:

• Image: For when you want to show an image on your form. This must not be confused with the "File upload" field, where users can upload files.
• Embed: For when you want to embed an external resource to your form. This is mostly meant for videos hosted on external platforms. But you are also able to embed other media.
  
• Spacer: For when you want to add a little bit more whitespace between form fields. We currently offer 3 different variations of spacing: small, medium and large.
  

Delay for redirects

It is now possible to set a delay (in seconds) before redirecting after a form was submitted. This can be useful if you want people to see the "Thank you" message before they are being redirected to the redirect URL you specified.

We also fixed the ~500ms delay that occurred before. If you have set a redirect URL and have not set a delay, you are being redirected instantly. Before the update, you would see the "Thank you" message show for a very short moment before being redirected.

Basic formatting for "Subtext"

It is now possible to add basic formatting, such as bold, italic and link, to the "Subtext" field.

Minor changes

We improved the "Connections" setup for forms. They are now available right below the form fields. It is now also much simpler to add / remove / manage connections.

Some other, minor changes include the way how data is transmitted / stored. This mainly affects the "Phone" and "Country" field. The "Phone" field now correctly stores the selected country code and not just the entered number. The "Country" field is now stored as "Countryname (Code)", e.g. Germany (DE). Before it was stored as DE - Germany. You can now also set a custom placeholder for the country and dropdown fields.

Apart from those changes and additions, we also fixed a handful of bugs and UI glitches. More to come soon, stay tuned.

Just some minor additions / changes today:

You can now duplicate form styles. This can save you some time when you need to create similar styles and only change minor things. We also improved a couple of smaller things regarding user experience that will smoothen the process of building forms a little more.

"Create a newsletter signup form. It must include a field for first name and one for the email address. The email address is mandatory."

Tell that to our newly released AI Assistant and you will get field suggestions which you can accept (and continue building) or reject (and start over).

This feature is currently in an "experimental" state and we will partially monitor the outcome to find any potential "drunk texting" responses. In our tests, the results were accurate (= something to work with) in 8 out of 10 tries. We did A LOT of testing and will continue to tweak the Assistant over the coming weeks to make this a 10/10. Go ahead and give it a try when creating a new form.

QR code for sharing the form

We also added an option to generate a QR code that directly links to the form. This will allow you to link to the form by sharing the QR code that people can then simply scan. The download link can be found in the lower right corner when editing a form.

Today we integrated support for Slack and Discord.

In addition to notifications via email, you – the admin – can now also be notified via Slack and Discord. Simply create a webhook url, add it to Deftform within the Notifications / Connections settings and assign it to any of your forms. We provide links to the respective docs on how to create a webhook url.

There are also options to directly deal with the new submission. You can either view it in your Deftform backend, download a CSV, or download a PDF. You will need to be logged-in to access those resources.

Today we added a new form field: Consent checkbox

This field allows you to create a, well... consent checkbox. This can be used to make sure people accept your privacy policy or agree that they have read other legal documents. Use it however you see fit. In the frontend, this will show the text you enter, with any additional links and a checkbox next to it.