Alongside Solidres 4.5.0 come 36 releases of add-ons, modules and the Lumina template. Hub partners get the new reports for their own properties, two new plugins arrive (Reports and Conversion tracking), the Channel Manager drops MyAllocator and takes in the Inventory grid, and Stripe works on Joomla 6. Above all, every Solidres add-on now updates through Joomla’s own updater.
Solidres 4.5.0 is out, and its headline is a Reports screen. Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR and revenue are worked out night by night, so a stay that runs across the end of a month counts in both months, as an accountant or a revenue manager would count it. Every figure can be charted, compared with the period before and exported to CSV.
It also puts online booking on the website a property already has: Solidres can now run as a booking site beside that website, and the booking form that sends guests to it is free.
The release also gives Solidres a place in Joomla’s own administrator menu and a dashboard that opens on today’s arrivals and departures, moves every Solidres update to Joomla’s updater, and makes Solidres pages follow your template’s light or dark mode. It fixes a security issue with bookings made without an account, so we recommend updating. And it starts a clear-out: Complex Tariff and Statistics leave in 4.6.0, and support for Falang is on its way out.
“Can the site be in German too?” is one of the first questions an owner asks once the booking site is live, and it is a fair one. A guest cannot book what they cannot read, and the booking sites already show the same rooms in the guest’s language. A direct site that answers only in English hands those guests back to the sites that charge a commission on every night.
The answer is yes, and it costs an afternoon rather than a licence, once you see that “the site in the guest’s language” is four separate layers: the booking engine’s own words, the owner’s descriptions, the rest of the site, and everything sent after the booking. The first ships with Solidres in its language packs. The other three come from Joomla’s content languages plus one free extension, Speedy Translate Lite, which adds language tabs to the forms the owner already uses.
City tax, tourist tax, occupancy tax, visitor levy, taxe de séjour, imposta di soggiorno: the name and the rules change from town to town. In some places the guest owes the tax and you collect it; in others the tax is yours and you may pass it on. Either way, the authority looks to you for the right amount. Charge too little and the difference comes out of your pocket; charge too much and you owe a guest a refund.
Every rule answers the same five questions: what is charged, who pays it, for how many nights, at which rate on which night, and whether VAT is added. Set up each tax so it gives those answers, show it on its own line before the guest pays, and keep the night-by-night figures your return asks for.
Speedy Translate 3.0 is out, and it is the biggest release since the first one. It now comes in two editions: Speedy Translate Lite, free, which translates a whole Joomla 6 site and adds nothing to your pages, and Speedy Translate Pro, for large sites and agencies. It is also fast. On every page we measured, it served translated pages faster than Falang, up to 5.8 times as fast.
Behind that sits a rebuilt translation engine, hreflang tags and translated URLs, a setup check that makes a site multilingual from the dashboard, and a one-click import from Falang. Pro adds bulk translation with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that runs in the background. The release also closes several security issues, so every site on Speedy Translate 2 should update.
