Using Amazon S3 to Secure Your Wufoo Form

We use Wufoo a ton here at John Carroll – it was one of the first things I signed us up for when I got there a little over a year ago and it’s taken the campus by storm.

Where there was previously no good way for people to do forms, registrations and feedback online (except for, ugh, SurveyMonkey), they now create all sorts of forms for our on and off campus audiences and process payments through it as well. It has saved me a ton of work over the last year, and for that I’m grateful. In fact, just last month we used it to do all the fundraising for our campus community radio station. It worked like a charm.

Two things that are cool about Wufoo are that forms you create there are hosted securely and that you can create your own themes and CSS to style your forms to match the look and feel of your institution. One of the ways to do this is to add in your logo to appear at the top of your forms. Ours looks like this:

Wufoo

I’m hosting that image in our account over at Amazon S3. In Wufoo’s theme creator, I listed the image as:

http://webmedia.jcu.edu/images/JCU_logo4.gif

That CNAME points to our S3 bucket. The image worked fine and looked great on our theme.

The only problem with doing it that way is that it makes the form unsecure. Chrome showed me this:

Insecure

After doing a bit of research, I was glad to see that you can, in fact, serve secure files from Amazon S3. The catch is that you cannot use a CNAME to access your files – you have to use Amazon’s domain name. Instead of using the URL above, to get secure files from S3, you have to structure your URL as so:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/webmedia.jcu.edu/images/JCU_logo4.gif

See, that was easy. Now my images and other files coming from S3 can be secure, if needed. Since the change, the form has been showing as completely secure.

Secure