Solidres

“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.

We’ve replaced the ageing jQuery UI date picker with a fast, dependency-free, OTA-style range picker — the same single-tap check-in → check-out flow your guests already know from the major travel-booking sites.

For years, every date field in Solidres — the booking funnel, the search modules, the admin reservation screens — was powered by the jQuery UI date picker. It did the job, but it was showing its age: two separate calendars for check-in and check-out, a heavy pile of JavaScript, no dark mode, and accessibility gaps that never sat well with modern web standards.

So we rebuilt it. Meet the modern date picker — and the unified search bar it now lives in. Available in Solidres v4.2.0.

Solidres has established itself as a versatile booking system and we are proud of that. Over the years, apart from traditional accommodation/tours & activities booking, we’ve seen many interesting Solidres’ use cases that we did not plan for them initially: 4G USB, yacht, cat boarding… It brings many exciting challenges for us.

Our new payment plugin Authorize.net has reached its beta state, this new plugin integrates with Authorize.net Advanced Integration Method (AIM) API which allows you to collect guest’s credit card and process (capture/authorize) it directly from your site without leaving it, we’d like to invite Solidres’s subscribers (requires at least Single subscription level) to help testing this plugin. If you want to join please open a new support ticket.

We’d love to announce our Black Friday and Cyber Monday discount 2015. To get the 20% discount, please use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY2015 while subscribing or renewing. This coupon code is valid from today to the end of next Tuesday (01 Dec 2015) and it is applied to all subscription levels.

We’ve launched a new coupon HOTSUMMER, you can use it to subscribe any of our subscription levels and get a 25% discount immediately. This coupon is only available this week from June 16 2014 to June 20 2014,  use it right now before it expires!

Channel Manager for Solidres, one of the most wanted feature is now available for beta testing. The feature is provided by the integration between Solidres and MyAllocator. The beta testing is available for all active subscribers, for more information how to join please create a new support ticket and we will work directly with you.

After the beta testing is completed, the Channel Manager will require a separated subscription level, the pricing is not yet determined but it will be very competitive. All beta testers will receive a big discount as a reward.

We are glad to announce the release of new Cielo payment plugin for Solidres, this plugin provides integration between Solidres and Cielo payment gateway, features are:

• Supported capture mode: Authorization and capture, Authorization only.
• Supported authorization mode: Do not authorize (only authenticate), Authorize only if authenticated, Authorize transaction authenticated and not authenticated, Authorize direct.
• Support language for Cielo’s buy page: Portuguese, English, Spanish.
• Support sandbox mode for testing purpose.

All Solidres’s subscribers can download this plugin from our Download section.

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.

We’ve spent the first 3 months of 2018 in the most energetic way, the big thanks to our users, you pushed us so hard with your valuable support, your endless feature requests and ideas for improvements and many bug reports. You always amazed us with many creative ways to use Solidres. You are the source of inspiration for our continuous development on Solidres. In this month we have made a big release with Solidres for Joomla 2.6.0 and release many new updates to Solidres modules/plugins/templates, we also released 03 new payment plugins for Experience (Authorize.net, Stripe and PayPal Pro). We are also working new Alipay payment plugin which should be released soon. Today we’ve just released 02 new WordPress themes (7Start and BlueBee) for our WordPress users, all of our Joomla templates are also updated to support latest Solidres releases.

We’d like to share some latest news regarding the development status of Solidres project:

1) Solidres v0.8.1: this is a maintenance release of 0.8.0x series and it should be released within this month.
2) Luxuria template: we are working to bring Luxuria template up to date with the latest version of Solidres.
3) Solidres v0.9.0: we are going to work on it right after v0.8.1 is delivered.
4) Solidres for WordPress: we’ve put significant work on this project and it is going very fast, you can find some screenshots below:

When it reaches the beta phase, we will open it for public download and testing.

In previous versions, the Filter module is pretty hard to be used in small screen devices because it is pushed down further the screen, make it irrelevant to the current property search page. It is no longer the issue with the latest version, please see the improvement in this short video (made with Joomla 4 Beta 6):

As requested by many users, we are working on a front end customer dashboard, this feature allows your customers to manage their reservations (changing dates, cancel reservation) and their profile from front end. Below is a screenshot of the current development branch.

This feature will be compatible with Solidres 0.8+, Solidres 0.8 is also in development, we will share more info about them in later posts.

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).

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.

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.

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.

We are very happy to announce two new important releases for Solidres: Infinity Joomla template and Solidres v1.7.0. Infinity is the first Joomla template that was designed with support for both Accommodation & Tour booking, it is also the first template that fully implement the new configurable media sizes feature. We also release updates to other plugins and modules, please see change log below for more details:

We’d like to announce the availability of two new payment plugin: Unionpay and Atlantic Bank. These new plugins are available for SINGLE, BUNDLE, HUB and DEVELOPER subscription levels.

For as long as Solidres has existed, selling your rooms on Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda or Vrbo has meant the same thing: open an account with a channel manager, re-create your property and every room type in their dashboard, copy mapping IDs back and forth, and then run your business out of two systems that both think they are in charge.

Today that changes. The Solidres Channel Manager is live — a channel connection service we operate ourselves, driven entirely from your Joomla administrator. No second dashboard. No second account. No second vendor.