Posts Tagged ‘international’
FormSmarts Soon in More Languages
We’ve started to translate FormSmarts’ form handler into other languages. When the international version is released, form users will see instructions, error messages, and confirmation messages in their preferred language.
International form owners will welcome this move, but not only them.
- FormSmarts users with international websites will be able to create forms in English, while making them available to an international audience without any extra efforts;
- a U.S. user with a preferred language set to Spanish in his browser will see messages in that language.
Note that the internationalization in progress only applies to the form processor at this time. At the rate we introduce new features to the form builder, we wouldn’t be able to keep translations in sync.
We’ve already emailed international users to ask anyone able and willing to translate FormSmarts into their own language to sign up. If you would like to contribute but didn’t get the email, please register here.
Update: We would like to thank all the users who have already volunteered to translate FormSmarts into their language. Our most wanted languages are currently:
- Chinese (Simplified) / 中文 (简体)
- Japanese / 日本語
- Russian / русский
- Italian / italiano
- Polish / polski
- Korean / 한국어
Posted on September 16th, 2008 in form handler.
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Tags: international, upcoming
Date Type & Datepicker
Anyone using a standard text field for dates should upgrade to the new date type.
Fields with the date type show as a text box, with a datepicker poping up when the field is selected. A datepicker allows users to input dates in an intuitive and interactive way, therefore reducing the risk of errors.
Date Format
Another reason for using a datepicker is to alleviate the date format problem. Because of date formatting differences, 12/07/2008 means December 7th in the U.S., but July 12th in Europe. Although we initially thought of adopting the ISO/W3C date format “yyyy-mm-dd”, we eventually preferred the U.S. format “mm/dd/yyyy”. That is, until we release an internationalized version of FormSmarts.
Because users don’t interact directly with the text field (unless they want to), but rather with the datepicker, they don’t have to be aware of date formatting issues.
To avoid any misunderstandings, dates are displayed as Sunday July 20, 2008.
Any questions or comments? Leave a reply. We are in particular interested in feedback from non U.S. users.
Posted on July 20th, 2008 in form handler.
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Tags: email notification, form handler, input field, international, web forms
Tips for Web Form Users with Non-English Language Websites
Many users in non-English speaking countries now use FormSmarts, so we thought we would post a few recommendations for them.
When building your forms with the form creator, use the text data type for any fields that may contain non-English characters, such as the accented characters found in many European languages.
Note that non-European languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian are not supported at this time.
As you know, FormSmarts form handler is not a simple form to email processor script like FormMail. Each and every web form submission is analyzed in real time, and the user may be asked to complete a challenge if we suspect a form spam attempt. Although anyone capable of reading elementary English should be able to understand what is expected from him/her in that context, this is something you may have to take into account when designing your web forms. You could for example warn users in the form filling instructions.
If you need help, we provide limited support in French, German, and Chinese (as well as English, of course.) You can write us in any of those languages, but we will only reply in English.
Posted on March 11th, 2008 in form handler.
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Tags: howto, international, web forms
