Jomres - THE online hotel booking and reservation system for Joomla, from Woollyinwales IT

For operational reasons, I'm going to be forced to raise the price of Jomres at the end of February 2010. It's been the same price for quite some time now, and I'd prefer it to remain that way, however as the business evolves so must the price of the product and it's support.

Over the years Jomres has grown in popularity from a small hobby project to a full blown application with a multitude of features. One area that I've always put extra energy into is support however the growth of the user base means that almost all of my time now is spent just running the site and dealing with questions. There's almost no time for further development.

So, I'm forewarning everybody now that the price will be going up to £179 on the first of March. This increase will help fund future development and support. It's a fairly steep jump from it's previous price however it's still extremely reasonable if you compare Jomres to it's main competitors, none of which are are GNU/GPL licensed. Nor are they open source, Ioncube is required on your server to run the applications.

Jomres, on the other hand, is fully Open Source, GNU/GPL licensed and you can run it on as many servers as you wish.

As always Jomres remains the best value for money.

NO ioncube. NO restrictions. Just great software.

A number of you will have noticed that we've been having some problems with the new shopping cart that we've recently adopted. It has been causing problems through out the Christmas period so I'm abandoning the cart and instead have blown the dust off the trusty old license server, given it a bit of a facelift, and restored it to it's rightful place of honour in the main menu (see My Account above).

If you've tried to purchase Jomres this Christmas only to be met with problems, I'd like to apologise. If you haven't received your download, please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with the payment service's transaction number and the products you purchased and I'll put it right.

Because of these problems, I've decided to extend the 25% discount sale right the way through January, using the discount voucher "andAHappyNewYear". See the folllowing snippet of the location discount voucher input on the checkout page.

Enjoy.

After much soul searching, I've come to realise that to stay active in the Joomla econosphere I have no choice but to license Jomres as GPL.

Everybody who uses the software agrees with me that it has no peers and it's the best at what it does, however in a market that's dominated by poor but free or cheap competitors it's not enough to make the best possible Joomla booking component, you have to go that one step further.

To that end I've now decided to relicense Jomres as GPL from v4.3.

Future purchases will be for the Jomres download and three months support, we will not be able to provide the lifetime support or upgrades that we did to pre-GPL clients.

Read more: Jomres is now licensed as GPL, as of Jomres 4.3.

A little change of pace for this news article, highlighting the White Lions of Timbavati.

Most Jomres users know that it can be used for more than just hotels. It's regularly used for things such as boats, cars etc but I'd like to point out a really unique and clever use here: Give a White Lion a day of Freedom.

Read more: A ray of light on an otherwise dull day

Jomres is a great hotel booking system, and we have lots of loyal users who're constantly coming up with new feature requests.

A frequent request nowadays is for inter-server connectivity. This could be for connectivity between bookings.com, or a remote PMS (Property Management System). Other requests include for desktop and mobile phone applications.

Looking at all these requests, the common requirement is for an established API that will allow a Jomres server and "a n other" server to talk to each other, so about a year ago I sat down and wrote the initial framework for the Jomres API plugin. Since then it has been tweaked and updated here and there.

Time has finally allowed me to take a few days off from support and sit down and work on a Windows application that uses the API, which I'm currently calling the Jomres Desktop Companion (JDC).

Read more: Introducing the Jomres Desktop Companion

This is a short note to advise folks that there will be extended support through our partnership with Open Source Support Desk for the next two weeks (2nd November - 16 November 2009).

For week one I will be focussing solely on some new Jomres API/Desktop software integration, and for the second I'll be having an honest-to-goodness holiday, the first in...well...forever.

Read more: Support Nov 2009

The newest version of Jomres is packed full of changes to help your system run faster, with more features, and more flexibility. The main focus of the changes for this version hinge around two particular new features : Jomres Standalone and framework changes to reduce the need for globals.

Read more: Jomres 4.2 is now available for download

Aside from a few changes to please our German clients this version introduces Jomres SA (Standalone) which is an addition to the existing Jomres functionality which allows Jomres to run without having to need Joomla's framework.

Development of this functionality is highly dependant on user feedback, so as always if it's something that interests you, please say so.

More information is here http://manual.jomres.net/Jomres_Standalone

The webinstaller has been updated to allow installation of alpha/beta/RC versions, get it here http://forum.jomres.net/index.php?topic=2358.0 You'll need this if you want to install Jomres as a standalone application. Note that the forum link is only available to users with full licenses.

Introducing Jomres Lite.

The latest and greatest version of Jomres has just got a new lease of life with the introduction of Jomres Lite, which is a feature reduced, but not crippled, version of Jomres 4.2.

Jomres Lite is dual licensed MIT/GPL, so it's totally free to all to download and use as you need. It's not an old version that the developer can't be bothered to maintain any longer, instead it's the newest version of Jomres with a handful of features removed but still perfectly usable.

Read more: Introducing Jomres Lite.

I don't normally post every time the wiki's updated, however this particular article should be highlighted to custom code developers.

The custom task calling has been modified in v4.2 to provide an additional layer of security by creating new custom tasks 06001/2/3. This is backwardly compatible with previous versions of Jomres in that 06000 tasks will stil be called, but future plugins should be developed adopting these tasks where appropriate.

See the article for more information.

I thought I'd just let folks know what the current roadmap for this autumn is going to be for Jomres.

Jomres as it stands now is pretty darned good. I've been building and rebuilding it a lot for the last few years and it's finally where I'd like it to be so apart from the odd feature and bug fixes it's largely going to remain static for at least the rest of this year. This will allow me to focus more on extra functionality (IE plugins) that folks have been asking for.

The main functionality I want look at falls into roughly three groups:

Tours
Resource Bookings
Reviews

Tours.

There's a lot of discussion regarding tours but very little consensus as to what it should entail. See this thread http://forum.jomres.net/index.php?topic=2067.0 for a taste of the conversation. As best as I can make out there are some folks who want to allow a user to add a bunch of hotels to a booking's dates and some want to book individual resources. For resources see the next item.

Tours really can be either one of two things. Either, they're guest generated, so a guest says I want to stay at Town A for one night, Town B for 3 nights and Town C for two nights. Jomres then could find propertys with rooms available in those towns and make the appropriate bookings for the guest.

Alternatively tours can be generated by an 'authorised' user of the system so they can propose tours, get buy-in from property managers who will sell them N rooms for X price for N nights and the tour creator would need to somehow sell those tours to guests.

I see Tours as functionality sitting on top of Jomres functionality so there's no need to add it to the core.

None of the above ideas are fixed, they're just possible solutions I'm looking at so if you want to have your say please feel free to join the forum and post your ideas.

Resource Bookings

Not long after I first started Jomres I decided I wanted to play around with the next new thing, AJAX. At the same time I was getting folks asking for the ability to book by time so Jombok was created. It allowed managers to make resources available via time and day of the week and quantity and I sold an awful lot of licenses. Since then I had to focus my attention on Jomres and Jombok was retired as an old project, but there are lots of folks out there who loved it's simple but efficient way of doing things, so I'm going to look at ways of integrating that old functionality into a Jomres booking form so that folks can add, say, opera tickets for the 3rd night of their stay, to a booking.

Reviews

jReviews by Alejandro is great but let's be honest, how many people know that it can be integrated with Jomres? Probably not that many. Add to that the fact that I hate it if Jomres has to rely on another plugin for functionality so I hope pretty soon to look at creating a plugin for Jomres that handles reviews.

Version 4.1.4 has been released.

A couple of key issues that it fixes are

• Mootools conflicts. A new option in Site Config -> Misc allows you to tell Jomres to output the Jomres javascript in the body of the script instead of the headers, which should resolve the mootools failing to play nicely with the jQuery library.
• Modified add plugin handling to get around pclzip library that has a bug on 64 bit servers, using the older zip library for unzipping from the plugin server, and pclzip if the installed file is from a file upload.

Also, the German language file has been, apart from a couple of new lines added very recently, brought up to date. Thanks Roger P.

The full changelog is here.

Just a quick word, two new plugins are available for purchase:

Extended Maps

Replaces the random search for non-authorised users.  By default, visitors to a Jomres menu item are presented by a random search of propertys. This plugin replaces that search with a google map of all propertys that have latitude and longitude information stored against their details. SRPs and MRPs are distinguished by different icons.

Local Events.

You can create local events and attractions in the administrator area of the site. When created they are viewable under the property details page, and if the Extended Maps plugin is installed then they will also be shown in the google map.

Installation is via the Jomres plugin manager's third party installer.

Purchase them here.

This summer's discount voucher

Well, it's summer again so that must mean it's time for another discount voucher for Jomres licenses.

Use the voucher code "summer2009" on the checkout page when purchasing Jomres (before you get to the 2Checkout payment page) to get a 25% discount on any Jomres license.*

This is a great offer and a discount will not be offered again until Christmas 2009, so grab it while it's available.

For information on how to get the discount, please see this wiki page .

In other news...

Read more: 2009 Summer news round up & discount voucher

There's a new document on the Jomres Wiki that provides some more information on the Jomres API plugin, and a new test server that users can play around with that simulates a remote server that communicates with a local Jomres server.

For those not in the know, the API is designed to allow remote servers to query and execute a limited set of commands on a Jomres server. The remote server might be a Property Management System for example.

Anyway, the API documentation is here.

The remote server simulation is here.

As of today the Joomla Extensions Directory team have removed all Joomla 1.0.x and non-GPL extensions (including Jomres) from the directory.

This is was a move publicised over the last Christmas period so there has been plenty of time for new extension directories that are non-GPL component friendly to rise and fill the void. Two that come to mind are CMSextensions and BestofJoomla. I personally prefer CMSextensions but it looks like BestofJoomla is coming on strong too.

So, remember folks when you're looking for the right application for your Joomla site, if you go to the JED you're unlikely to see the best possible choices available to you, and I'd advise you to make CMSextensions or BestofJoomla your first port of call.

I've had a few people with Jomres behaving strangely on certain servers. A typical example is where the tariffs look correct but prices only work out correct for one or two days.

This isn't a bug in Jomres, it's the Joomla cache. It's intercepting the calls to Jomres and instead using data it's cached to generate the content. Given the nature of the booking form's dynamic information, this is a bad thing so if you find that the booking form's not working as expected make sure that caching is disabled in both Joomla's Global Configuration, and that the Cache System Plugin is disabled.

Whilst it would be better for Jomres to programatically tell Joomla not to cache it's pages, I haven't yet found out how to do that, so in the short term at least it's best to disable Joomla's caching (although of course you can still use Jomres's caching).

Just a quick note to say that Jomres v4.0.1 has been released.

It contains a couple of small tweaks to improve things.

As v4 now runs in it's own directory the license key (key.php) is housed in /jomres/temp instead of the old /media folder, but v4 wouldn't force a rebuild of the key file because it was looking in the wrong place for it. That's now been fixed in 4.0.1. If you're having problems with the license in v4.0.0 (ie v4stable) then first and foremost, see if deleting /jomres/temp/key.php fixes the problem.

I've added a feature to detect if the template file on disk is newer than that in the database (for those of you using the template editing feature in administrator). This will help you to see that there may have been changes to the templates you've custom coded. This was prompted by....

Added a feature to the booking forms so if the property doesn't have any coupon codes against it, then the coupon input isn't shown. This means that both the dobooking.html and dobooking_srp.html files have been changed slightly.

Now, a quick word of warning. The weather forecast for the next few days is good, so I'm going to do something that I haven't done in years, that that's Take A Holiday. I'm not going away, I'll still be monitoring the tickets/forums etc and if there are any really critical issues (like you raising a ticket because of license issues) then I'll respond, but for the most part, until at least  Tues 2nd of June, I'll be taking a long weekend. Play nicely with each other while I'm away.

Changelog:

Added ability for Jomres to detect when a template on disk is newer than the last time the template in the db was edited and warn that it may have been updated.
Added code to detect usage of coupon codes. If there are no codes for the property, then the coupon input isn't shown in the booking form. Note that the booking form templates (dobooking.html and dobooking_srp.html have changed as a result).
Modified site config to remove key file on save, previous path was incorrect.
Tweaks to multilanguage handling to correctly pull and use the language file appropriate when calling a module but not showing Jomres proper.
Removed default date settings from list propertys book now link as no longer required as validto and from timestamps no longer used in booking engine.
Fixed issue in paypal gateway where settings overridden weren't being pulled from the db correctly.
 

Jomres v4 is stable.

For information and upgrade instructions, please see the news article regarding Beta3 , the same information applies to V4 Stable.