You can now use Web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application,  to sell downloadable items such as document files (e.g. PDFs and Word files), music files (e.g. MP3), photos, graphics, eBooks and so on.

This new feature provides you with a secure vault for your files. Once your customers have made their payment, Web-store-buddy creates a download page just for them. You can set the validity of the download page to a certain number of days, and you can set a limit to the number of times a file can be downloaded.

Before long we expect to roll out this functionality to Web-form-buddy too so that you can create payment forms to sell digital content.

Web-form-buddy’s file uploads option has a built-in “uploads progress” display. Now there is an option to animate how the progress bar opens – a cool effect that makes the file upload experience easier on the eye for your customers. The options available are:

• Slide in (from the left, from the right, from the top, or from the bottom)
• Open from the center
• Fade in

Of course – there’s also an option for “no animation” if effects like these are not your thing!

We have just added a new payment method for Web-form-buddy order forms and for the Web-store-buddy shopping cart. This new method is to handle the situation when your customer will either pay you on delivery of the order (“Cash On Delivery”), or when they come to collect their order.

To enable and customize this new method, just log in to your control panel and navigate to ‘global options’.

Web-form-buddy‘s date validation & formatting for text fields is now more flexible. As well as creating templates for full dates (e.g. “mm-dd-yyyy“), you can now also create templates for partial dates such as month and year (e.g. “mm-yy“), or even just day of the month (“dd“).

To make  creating new forms on your web site as easy as possible,  we have added a new option “import settings from another form“. This feature allows you to copy settings from one form to another. You can choose to copy all settings, or just specific categories of settings – such as auto-responder settings, file upload settings, and so on.

A good way to get the most out of this feature is to create a “golden form” – i.e. one with all your favorite settings. Then after you create a new form, just import the settings from your golden form, and you’ll be pretty much good to go.

Web-form-buddy is a great productivity tool. It makes it really quick and easy to create and deploy forms on your web site. And now it just got even faster!

We have just launched a new option that allows you to configure the design of HTML formatted emails that Web-form-buddy sends out on your behalf. These include

• Autoresponder emails
• Payment receipts
• Form notifications

You can find this new option on your Web-form-buddy control panel under  “global options” >> “color & style settings” >> “HTML styled email“. There you can configure the color scheme, adjust the banner and frame border, set fonts and font sizes, and so on.

Although you have the option of using plain text formatted emails – it’s certainly a lot more impressive to send an attractively styled and formatted email, especially if it’s something your customers are going to see (such as a form auto-responder message or a payment receipt).

There are so many different ways that folks read their email these days. There’s regular desktop software applications such as Microsoft Outlook (and the various different versions in use),  Apple Mail,  Thunderbird,  Lotus Notes, and so on. Then there are webmail options such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And finally we have mobile applications such as BlackBerry, Android, iPad,  iPhone etc. etc..

It’s an unfortunate fact that not all of these email clients support the latest and best features of modern web page design – for example CSS layout without tables and  Javascript. But you’ll be pleased to know that we have created and tested  our configurable HTML email option to work consistently with all of these different ways of reading email!

Web-form-buddy has some new options for formatting form data. You can find these on your control panel at “global options” >> “data options”.

You can choose the symbol to use as a field/value data separator, choose a symbol for blank fields, set the font style and case for field names, and set the font style for field values.

Today we have added a new payment method for our Web-store-buddy shopping cart application and our Web-form-buddy payment forms application.

The new payment option is for payments “on account“. With this option your customer is asked to supply a purchase order number and the name of the purchasing organization when placing the order. If you wish you can choose to display a message such as  “This payment option is only available for approved accounts“.

The Refer-a-buddy “tell a friend” window is available in various color schemes. We have just done a “spring clean” to tidy up and improve the CSS styles that are used. The window size is slightly larger too, as it was not appearing quite right in all browsers.

If you have Refer-a-buddy installed on your site using code that references “https://www.smallgreentree.net/js/rab0308.js” then you’re up to date and need take no action. But if you’re a long time user of Refer-a-buddy we recommend strongly that you update your web pages to the latest code. This is available by logging into your control panel and selecting “setup“.

We’ve added a new feature to Web-form-buddy that allows you to use Google Analytics to track your form submissions. In particular, if you use the “payment forms” option, you can track e-commerce data such as revenue, conversion rates, average order value, product performance, transactions, visits to purchase, days to purchase, and so forth.

To enable Google Analytics tracking, navigate to “global options” on your Web-form-buddy control panel.