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- Written by: Viet Vu
Alongside Solidres 4.7.0 come 20 add-on releases. Hub partners get the new reservation list and reservation screen, Invoice and Feedback send their emails in the new design and you word them on the Emails screen, and Conversion tracking moves its settings into Solidres Options, where it can wait for the new cookie banner. Most of these releases also carry security fixes, so we recommend updating them all.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Solidres 4.7.0 is out. Your guests' booking emails have a new design, and you write them yourself: a new Emails screen gives each email a subject and a message per property and per language, with a preview and a test sent to you, and no Super User needed.
The reservation screens are rebuilt, for your staff and for your guests. The reservations list has quick filters, status badges and date ranges, and stays fast however many bookings it shows; a booking opens on a summary. Guests see their bookings under Upcoming, Past and Cancelled, and each one reads like a receipt. And your site can now ask for cookie consent by itself, in your guests' language and your template's colours.
This release also fixes the issues of our security review that were still open, so we recommend updating. If you changed an email with a template override or a language override, read Before you update first.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Solidres 4.7.0 rebuilds the emails your guests receive about their booking. They get a new design that reads well on a phone, and you write their wording yourself, per property and per language, on a new Emails screen, with a preview and a test sent to your own inbox.
To make that possible, 4.7.0 replaces the files the emails were made from. If you, or the agency that built your site, changed the wording or the design of an email, that change stops when you update, and the email goes out with the standard text and the new design. This post explains how to tell whether your site is concerned, and how to carry your change over.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Alongside Solidres 4.6.0 come 14 releases of add-ons and the Lumina template. Experience sells tours with a stay and prices every booking the same way, Lumina gains new header, hero, footer and font settings, and the Hub moves its partners onto the new property screen. Experience and Limit Booking also carry security fixes, so we recommend updating.
Solidres 4.6.0 is here: a property screen in plain words, tours with a stay and a public booking API
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Solidres 4.6.0 is out, and most of it is for the people who run a property day to day. The property's edit screen is rebuilt in plain words: seven tabs made of sections, a label on every setting that says what it does and a line of help under it, in all 25 languages.
With Experience 2.4.0, guests can add a tour to their stay in the property's booking form and pay for both at once. A public booking API, off until you switch it on, lets other websites, apps and AI assistants find a free room, price it exactly as your booking form does and book it. And with Rate Plan 1.2.0, last year's prices fill next year's empty days in one save.
Complex Tariff and Statistics are gone, as announced with 4.5.0: the update moves a site onto Rate Plan, Front Desk and Dashboard, which use the same data. The release also charges extras priced per night or per person correctly again, and closes the files attached to reservation notes to the web, so we recommend updating.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Your website does its job. It shows the rooms, the garden and the breakfast, somebody built it on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace, and you are not about to replace it. But its Book now button opens your listing on an OTA, an email address or a contact form. The first pays commission on a guest who had already found you. The other two ask the guest to wait for a reply, and plenty of guests book somewhere else while they wait.
You do not need a new website to take bookings directly. Keep the one you have, put your booking pages beside it on an address of your own, and paste a small form into your website that sends guests to those pages with their search already made. The booking then happens on your own Solidres site, so the guest list, the payment and the availability you share with the OTAs stay in one place that you control.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
“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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Alongside Solidres 4.4.0, eleven add-ons and the Lumina template have new releases. Three more add-ons now install as Joomla packages, the Hub and the invoices take up the new tourist tax, iCal sync stops losing imported dates when a download fails, the Experience booking form is rewritten, and Lumina now works in right-to-left languages.