The New Year is coming and we wish you a New Year as cheerful and happy as you are.
In the recent months, we’ve been working on many exiting new features for Solidres which will be available in the beginning of 2017. But let save that for 2017, let talk about our brand new Joomla extension: Speedy Translate.
As the name says, this is a dedicated Joomla extension with the ultimate goal to make translating work in Joomla easier and speedier. Our motivation to create this extension is from the fact that building a multilingual site in Joomla is somewhat a confusing and time consuming task, even for an experienced Joomla users, let alone new users. If you have built a multilingual site with Joomla, you will probably agree with us.
Speedy Translate will help you to translate static content and dynamic content in Joomla easier and speedier. For those who does not know about them, static content refers to all content in your Joomla site that are not stored inside your database but in your file system like language files while dynamic content is stored inside your database like your articles.
To translate static content, you will need to edit the language file in INI format (.ini). To translate dynamic content, with Joomla! there are two popular options:
Option 1: using the core Joomla multilingual feature by defining content’s associations. Now each content will be assigned a specific language and they are linked with each other via associations, let say you want to translate your article About us in English to Italian, Japanese and German, you will need to create 03 new articles for those languages and associate them with the original About us article, that means now you will have 04 articles for 04 languages. The advantage of this option is that it is built-in feature but it creates a lot of duplications.
Option 2: using a 3rd Joomla! extension called Falang. This extension takes a different approach and it only allows translate what need to be translate (configured via a file call Content Element), that means there will be less duplication and this is a recommended option.
There are two main hassles when building a multilingual site in Joomla!:
First, when user need to translate static content like a label, a button text, user has to figure out what INI language is storing it and where is the INI language file stored in the file system. Then user need to edit the INI language file manually, the whole process is not convenient at all. And that is what motivated us to create the feature INI TRANSLATE and the CONTEXT TRANSLATION which you can access above.
Second, when translating dynamic content, there is no User Interface that allows users to work on multiple languages concurrently. With Speedy Translate’s INLINE TRANSLATION, you will have that ability, it will save time and avoid confusion for users.
Those hassles will be no longer your issues anymore with Speedy Translate, check this page for more screenshot. We have a special 50% discount coupon SPEEDYTRANSLATE for all active Solidres subscribers when you subscribe Speedy Translate, it is valid from today until Jan 15 2017.
Enjoy a great holiday with your family and friends, see you again in 2017!
The Travel & Tourism industry is no doubt a huge global market, according to the statistics from Statista.com, in 2015 this industry has contributed directly 2.23 trillions U.S. dollars into the global economy.
In such huge market, there are a lot of chances for everyone from traditional tour companies to a new trend called tours by locals.
Traditional tour companies offer well established travel plans from domestic to international destinations. The tourists often travel in large group with fixed schedule and destinations and it suits many tourists types from single, couple, family, group of friends, company trip. The travel plans are usually the same from month to month and year to year with little or no changes.
In the other hand, it is quite different for tours by locals. First, the number of tourist in a tour is often smaller, travel in a small group has several advantages like less conflicts, more flexible travel plans. Second, the tours are tailor-made and more dynamic which bring you a whole new unique travel experiences. Third, traveling with a passionate local could be more interesting and tourist can discover many new things from the destination more than they can do with a professional tour guide. More and more people nowadays are choosing this new way for their travel. We can see an increasing number of online booking sites for tour by locals like: vayable.com, triip.me and the recently launched airbnb.com for experiences
Regardless of whether you are a traditional tour company or an operator of a tours by locals site, Solidres.com offers you a solid platform that your business can rely on when competing in this huge market.
We’ve like to introduce Solidres for WordPress 0.8.0 and Solidres for Joomla 1.8.1 released. There are also updates to existing plugins, detailed change log can be found below:
Solidres for WordPress v0.8.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add check update feature
Fix time zone issue
Fix discount issue not filter by asset
Fix sending reservation email with PayPal
Discount v0.3.0 (WordPress)
Fix issue that disqualified discounts can stop further processing
Invoice v0.4.0 (WordPress)
Fix missing phone number in invoice notification email
Fix asset name does not support i18n
Fix per booking extra item does not show in PDF voucher
Offline v0.4.0 (WordPress)
Add support for Bootstrap 3
User v0.6.0 (WordPress)
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Solidres for Joomla v1.8.1
Improve Bootstrap 3 support
Fix live update checking with unpublished extensions
Fix PHP strict standard messages
Improve translation
Hub v0.9.1 (Joomla)
Fix upload issue in front end media manager.
Improve Bootstrap 3 support
Ical v0.2.0 (Joomla)
Refactor to support per room type instead of per asset
Solidres for Joomla 1.8.0 has been released with a lot of new features, improvements and bug fixes. We also introduce 03 new plugins and 01 new back-end module: Facebook Pixel plugin, Google Adwords plugin, ResCode plugin and Quick Search module. There are also updates for existing plugins/modules/templates (Luxuria, BlueBee, Adora) for Joomla, please check the change log and our download page for more information:
Solidres for Joomla v1.8.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ability to disable online booking and show enquiry form instead
Add live checking update for com_solidres and all installed modules/plugins/templates
Add coupon support for extra item.
Add ability to auto create menu item for asset
Improve media manager, more responsive and show more items per page to save space
Improve responsive for front end and back end layout
Update ru-RU translation
Add new option to configure whether deposit can take extra items’s cost into calculation or not
Add ability to disable template override for testing purpose
Fix reservation issue with timezone in some rare cases
Fix various PHP notice messages
Advanced Extra v0.4.0
Add new charge type: allow charge
Authorize.net v0.4.0
Refactor the code base
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Currency v0.3.0
Fix PHP Fatal error in CLI
Add new currency exchange source in addition to ECB
Add ru-RU translation
Custom Field v0.4.0
Add option to disable customer registration
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Fix installer custom script
Fix issue that Falang content element is not copied during installation
Discount v0.3.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Fix issue that disqualified discount can stop processing other discounts
Eway v0.2.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add card type validation
Experience v0.3.0
Add new Bank Wire payment option
Add new Offline payment option
Add new Invoice plugin for Experience
Add ability to automatically create menu for experience
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Support multilingual searching for Base location/End location
Add ability to select all dates in a month when setting availability by clicking on month name
Add new option to specify default payment method
Add new option to disable front end customer registration
Add go back button for the book form
Add ru-RU translation
Improve the layout in both backend and front end.
Fix issue that Falang content element is not copied during installation
Fix issue with min participant number displayed incorrectly in front end
Apply Solidres’s date format
Fix incompatibility issue with Joomla caching
Fix saving issue with empty tax
Improve translation
Experience Search module v0.3.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Experience List module v0.3.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Hub v0.9.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Improve responsive for map modal
Improve responsive for wishlist toolbar
Asset module v0.5.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ability to show specific asset
Add ru-RU translation
Filter module v0.5.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Fix various filtering issue when the page is not loaded correctly
My Recent Search module v0.4.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Invoice & PDF v0.6.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add coupon code into PDF voucher
Add ru-RU translation
Improve responsive
Limit Booking v0.5.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-Ru translation
Fix PHP Fatal error in front end hub dashboard
Fix time zone issue
Coupons module v0.5.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Extras module v0.4.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Offline v0.5.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Fix JS conflict when CVV is disabled
Fix credit card validation conflicts with other payment plugins
Fix various PHP notice related to non-exist session value
Statistics v0.6.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Fix invalid HTML syntax in dashboard statistics
Fix dashboard reservation ordering and hide trashed/cancelled reservations
User v1.3.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-Ru translation
Fix missing navigation bar in my reservation view of customer dashboard
MIGS v0.2.0
Fix issue with hashing method
Add sandbox mode
Map module v0.4.0
Add ability to show map module inline
PayPal Pro v0.2.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Advanced Search module v0.8.0
Add support for Bootstrap 3
Add ru-RU translation
Fix conflict with Chosen JS library
Fix HTML label attribute
Facebook Pixel v0.1.0
Initial release, integrate Solidres with Facebook Pixel
Google Adwords v0.1.0
Initial release, integrate Solidres with Google Adwords
Rescode v0.1.0
Initial release, allow customizing the reservation code
Experience Invoice v0.1.0
Initial release, allow generating and managing invoice for experience reservation
Quick Search module v0.1.0
Initial release, this is a back-end module which is displayed in the top right of all pages in your Joomla backend, ut allows you to search for reservation by reservation code/customer name/reservation id/transaction id.
We’ve just released new updates for Emerald, Orient and Lamour templates, including support for Solidres for Joomla v1.7.0 and latest plugins, their quick start packages are also updated to run latest Joomla 3.6.2 release. We are working on other templates to keep them up to date too. All active subscribers can download from our Download section.
Solidres for Joomla v1.8.0 is almost completed and it should be released next month, there are many improvements/bug fixes/new features in this version, one of the notable change is that Bootstrap 3 will be supported. There will be 03 new plugins to be released with this version as well, some existing plugins will also be updated and among them is Experience v0.3.0 which got the most updates and new features.
