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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.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Solidres 4.4.0 is out, and its headline is tourist tax. Until now a property had one tourist tax setting: an adult rate, a child rate and a night cap. That fitted some towns and not many others. It could not hold two levies, every new rate had to be typed in on the day it started, and two of its charge types did not compute what they promised.
In 4.4.0 tourist tax is a feature of its own, built into Solidres itself. The release also brings a set of booking and payment fixes, two security fixes, and pages that print properly from a device in dark mode.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
If you sell the same room on your own website and on one or more booking sites, something has to tell each of them when a night is sold. When nothing does, two guests book the same room, and one of them gets a phone call nobody wants to make.
There are two ways to pass that message along, and both are sold under the same word: sync. They move very different things. iCal sync moves blocked dates, after a delay. A channel manager moves availability, rates, restrictions and the reservation itself, as they change. Which one you need depends on your property, and for some properties the lighter one is enough.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell.
That arrangement has a name worth saying out loud: you are renting your demand, not owning it. The visibility, the terms and, in a real sense, the guests belong to someone else, and they can change without asking you. The answer is not to leave the OTAs. It is to run a booking channel of your own beside them, and to make it the one everything else follows.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Every Solidres template we have shipped — Emerald, Greenery, Infinity, and the older Adora, Bluebee, Luxuria, Orient, Revive and the rest — is built on Helix Ultimate. That was a reasonable decision at the time, and it came with a bill you have been paying ever since: a template that cannot render without its companion system plugin, a page grid stored as a drag-and-drop JSON blob, SCSS compiled on every request, and a header, nav and footer whose markup does not live in the template at all — it lives inside the plugin, where you cannot read it, let alone override it.
Today that changes. Lumina is a new Joomla 6 template for Solidres, written from nothing, with no framework underneath it. It is aimed squarely at boutique and independent properties — one beautiful hotel, or a small collection — and it is built around the one journey that matters on a hospitality site: search, choose a room, book.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Four Solidres add-ons have new releases: Hub 2.2.0, Experience 2.1.0, Feedback 2.1.0 and Rate Plan 1.1.1. The biggest change is how three of them install: Hub, Experience and Feedback now each come as one Joomla package. There is also a new Hub module, partner sign-up for new visitors, tour booking in every language and a long list of fixes. All four need Solidres 4.3.0.
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- Written by: Viet Vu
Solidres 4.3.0 is out. It is a polish and hardening release: cleaner URLs, better headings and accessibility, a smoother booking flow and two security fixes. The Hub, Experience and Feedback add-ons also now ship as packages. Every fix is in Solidres itself, so every site benefits, whichever template it runs.