One of the most requested Solidres’s feature is the ability to serve multiple reservation assets or in short: a booking portal, today we are glad to announce the availability of Hub 0.1.0. You can see it in this live demo or download now (for subscribers).
Overview characteristics
- Fast: since Hub is used for multiple reservation assets, it need to be extremely fast, this is the reason why we’ve done a large code re-factoring to keep the whole system cleaner, faster and more maintainable. In addition, in the search result page we use AJAX in filtering, sorting and pagination which doesn’t require a full page reload like other products.
- User friendly: we’ve put a lot of efforts to make sure it looks and works nicely in desktop/mobile/small screen. The layout is organized cleanly with a right amount of elements in right positions and showed at right times, we try out best to avoid overloading user with a lot of information. Making booking process a comfortable experience is always our ultimate goal.
- Modularity: we separate features into individual units and you only have to install what you want. At this point, Hub plugin comes with 3 modules (more to come).
Backend
- Manage facilities.
- Mange themes.
- Manage filter price range for each currency.
- New menu type to show the frontend dashboard.
- New menu type to show the frontend search page. This menu type has 2 parameters: Location and Category Ids which allows creating a menu to show specific location and specific categories (one or more categories).
Frontend: 3 new modules
- Advanced search: it is similar to the current Check Availability module but has an extra field to check availability by location.
- Filter: a smart filtering module with self-update capability. Allows filtering by price range, category, stars, theme, facility.
- Location map: it automatically display the mini map of current location, clicking on the mini map will show a nearly full screen map with all assets/hotels in that location, we load the larger map on demand for better overall performance.
Frontend: Ajax-based advanced filter module and pagination
- Bookmarkable filtered results: for example you can filter for all 3-stars hotels in Rome which have the prices between $50 – $200 and have facilities like Wifi and Parking etc, then you can bookmark it for later reference or share it with your friend easily.
- Filtered results do not lost after page refreshed.
- Filter by price range (can be configured per currency, each currency has different range), can filter by one or multiple price ranges.
- Filter by categories.
- Filter by stars.
- Filter by themes (eg: Business, Romance / Honeymoon, Family).
- Filter by facilities (eg: Wifi, Parking, Pet friendly ).
- Self-update filter module: the filter module will automatically updated itself to reflect the current showed results. For example if you filtered for 3 stars hotels, all other filters like categories, themes, facilities, prices will automatically adjusted accordingly for 3 stars hotels only.
Frontend: Ajax-based sorting bar
- Allow sorting by stars, names.
- Show results in grid view or list view.
- Like the filtering feature, all sorted results can be bookmarked or shared easily.
- Sorted results do not lost after page refreshed.
Frontend: Management
- Registered users have dedicated front end dashboard: manage reservation assets, room types, coupons, extras, limit bookings, reservations. (very similar to same tasks in backend).
- Each registered users is only able to mange their own reservation assets.
Notes
- As mentioned in our previous blog post, all current active subscribers at this point will be able to download Hub without having to subscribe new subscription level.
- Our template 7Start and BlueBee are not yet fully updated to run Hub, more information about templates updates will be announced later.