Meet Front Desk & Dashboard — your calendar and reports, rebuilt
For years, one plugin called Statistics quietly ran two of the most important screens in Solidres: the daily booking calendar your front desk lives in, and the reports you check to see how the business is doing. Those are two very different jobs — so we’ve split them into two purpose-built tools, and rebuilt both from the ground up. Say hello to Front Desk and Dashboard — arriving with the upcoming Solidres 4.1.0 release.
Why one plugin became two
The old “Statistics” plugin had grown into a catch-all, and it stood on foundations that had run out of road:
- The name hid the most important screen. The booking calendar — drag a reservation to a new room, extend a stay, take a quick booking — is mission-critical, operational software. Calling it “Statistics” buried it next to the charts.
- Its libraries reached end-of-life. The charts ran on jqPlot (a jQuery plugin from around 2014 that still shipped IE8 fallbacks), the world map on the abandoned jVectorMap, and the calendar’s drag-and-drop on jQuery UI plus a touch shim — none of them maintained any more.
- It couldn’t keep up with modern Joomla. No dark mode, no keyboard path for moving bookings, and a single view that loaded more than twenty separate scripts and stylesheets.
Patching that wasn’t worth it. Two clean, focused rebuilds were.
Two tools, each built for its job
Front Desk (Run your day)
The reservation calendar, reimagined as purpose-built front-desk software. The tape chart is now a true CSS grid — bookings land on real dates, not pixel positions — so it’s accurate, works right-to-left, and scrolls cleanly with a sticky room column and sticky day headers.
- Today at a glance: a KPI strip across the top — arrivals, departures, in-house, and occupancy for today.
- Payment at a glance: every bar now carries a paid / partial / unpaid marker, alongside its reservation-status color.
- Move bookings any way you work: drag and resize with one code path for mouse, touch, and pen — plus a full keyboard edit dialog, so changing a room or dates never requires a mouse.
- Find anything fast: search by guest name or reservation code, a continuous “today” line, a hover preview, and a zoom control for long date ranges.
Dashboard (See the big picture)
Your reporting surface, redesigned for clarity. All your charts now run on a single modern engine — Chart.js v4 — and the world map on the maintained jsVectorMap, replacing two ageing chart libraries and an abandoned map plugin.
- Trends, not just totals: stat cards show a change-vs-last-period chip and a little sparkline, so a number tells you which way it’s heading.
- A designed layout: widgets are grouped into clear sections — Today, Performance, and where your guests come from — instead of a flat wall of boxes.
- Honest empty states: a fresh install or a quiet range shows a friendly “no data yet” message instead of a blank chart or empty map.
- Readable to everyone: each chart ships a screen-reader data table behind it, revenue / bookings / top room types / origins, all the way through.
Why the rebuilds are better
| Old Statistics | New Front Desk & Dashboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | One plugin doing two jobs under the wrong name | Two focused, independently installable plugins |
| Technology | jqPlot, jQuery UI, jVectorMap — all abandoned | Framework-free JS, Chart.js v4 & jsVectorMap |
| Calendar layout | Pixel-positioned bars on a fixed grid | CSS Grid tape chart — real dates, RTL-ready |
| Page weight | 20+ scripts & styles per view | Three assets or fewer per view |
| Dark mode | None | Built in |
| Accessibility | Mouse-only, no keyboard path | WCAG 2.1 AA — keyboard, labels, contrast |
| Security | No more updates to the libraries | Actively maintained & future-proof |
Everything you relied on is still here — the same calendar workflow, quick and limit bookings, the same charts, origins, and world map, the same widget builder — just faster, clearer, and far easier on the eyes.
No rush — old and new run side by side. Front Desk and Dashboard install alongside the existing Statistics plugin and read the very same data. Nothing to migrate, nothing to break: switch the new plugins on to upgrade, off to fall straight back to the old screens. Enable just one or both. Take your time, give them a try, and tell us what you think — your feedback shapes where they go next.
Ready to make the switch?
Front Desk and Dashboard land with Solidres 4.1.0, free with every active subscription. If yours has lapsed, there’s never been a better moment to come back — and if you’re new here, this is modern, secure hotel booking for Joomla, done right. Renew or subscribe today.
Trackback from your site.