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Earlier this year we ran a survey to keep ourselves up to date with how our site visitors are using Jomres. Well, the results are in and I thought it would be nice to share those results with you.

We received over 200 survey replies, which was nice and I'd like to thank everybody who participated.

There were 40 questions, aimed at both those people who purchased Jomres Developer and those that didn't.

Please note that questions about Jomres Lite were entered before we released v5 of Jomres, where Jomres Core is now free and Lite is no longer offered. I've also edited some of the textual replies to ensure that there's no personal information released or simply to make it more readable. I've tried to leave criticism in place, otherwise what's the point of a survey?

A couple of questions have been removed because they're interesting to us, but add nothing substantial to the survey itself.
The survey itself was anonymous, so if a question was entered and the person didn't include an email address in that page we cannot contact them to clarify their comment/question.

Jomres v5.2 has been released.

This version, as usual, brings some new functionality that we believe people will like.

Let's start with the fun one : Price conversion to a user's chosen currency.

It's summer, and once again we're running our Summer Discount scheme.

A quick note to say that Jomres v.5.2beta1 has been released.

This version introduces a new feature in Jomres : Price conversion.

Exchange rates for 129 currencies are downloaded once a day and stored locally. These rates then are used to output property prices in the user's chosen currency. The whole feature set is seamless and requires no intervention from the site manager at all, and if required the feature can be disabled via an option in the administrator area's Site Configuration page.

Depending on the speed of your server, it might take a few moments for your server to download the exchange rate information from the remote site. On my localhost this takes 20 or so seconds, but I'd expect it to be significantly quicker on a server hosted in a data centre. As this is only done once a day, however, I wouldn't expect it to slow sites down by much.

Feedback welcome.

There are also a couple of bug fixes included in this version, as per the norm.

This is a quick note to say that Jomres v5.1 has been released. It contains a bundle of small bug-fixes and tweaks and some new functionality to compress many of the javascript files that are used by Jomres (we couldn't get them all to compress due to how they're made).

Due to the compression feature, we've needed to release a new version of the Alternative Initiation script (alt_init) and the search modules, so please ensure that you've upgraded those plugins after you upgrade Jomres.*

* Remember, if you no longer have a valid download and support license then it's better that you don't upgrade, as you won't be able to download the most recent version of those plugins.

The best ever version of Jomres has been released, Jomres v5!

Jomres v5 isn't a completely new version with lots of new bells and whistles, in fact in most ways it looks remarkably like v4.7.8. No, instead v5 heralds a change in how we do business. From now on we will be releasing the core Jomres booking system as free to download, and functionality that makes it into a portal system has been put into distinct Core Plugins.

Making this change allows us to keep the project as true to the spirit of Open Source as we can, whilst still raising revenue to support future development. Funds will be raised by offering access to core plugins (of which there are currently > 70) and through support, our commitment to which is already well known.

Spring is finally here.

The birds are tweeting and the garden's starting to show signs of life so we're celebrating with an impromptu discount code for Jomres.

If you use the code "itsspringtime" EXPIRED you'll get a massive 25% discount on the price of any Jomres license, but you'll need to be quick, it's only valid until the 20th of April!

Jomres 4.7.6 has been released.

This is largely a cosmetic release where the manager's ui has been improvded, however it does include a few new things :

Yep, it's that time of the year again folks where we celebrate Jomres' 6^th birthday.

Normally we celebrate on the 18^th of March, but this year our Six Nations discount has been running but as that's finished now we're free to issue a new discount code. This year the discount code is 'hoppybifday'. EXPIRED.

This code's run is a short one, it expires on the 27^th of March so grab it whilst it's hot!

As you will know, Jomres is a very powerful peice of software. Indeed, it's found on thousands of website around the world.

It's power, however, can also make it daunting for site designers to present to their less computer-literate users, sometimes there's just too much power.

By default, Jomres has some functionality to reduce the number of options a user needs to see to set up their site, however for some this is still not enough, so we've been working the last couple of weeks on a new plugin for Jomres called the Portal UI.

I'm a great fan of international rugby, so to celebrate this year's Six Nations tournament we're offering a 25% discount off the price of Jomres Developer, download and support licenses for the duration of the series.

The voucher is 'sixnations2011',EXPIRED and will be valid from today (4th of February 2011) to the last match on the 19th of March.

Go on you fellas in white!

As well as the usual tweaks and bug fixes (all pretty minor) we've also been working on frontend performance (particularly in regard to super property managers) and added to Jomres the ability for the system to automatically suspend managers and properties if they haven't paid their commission invoices.

Property managers (not super managers) can now see their commission invoices via the manager's toolbar in the frontend.

Site managers can enable commission functionality via the Site Configuration option in the administrator area. The functionality has been moved to a new ROI tab in that page, and includes a new option to enable auto-suspend, and a threashold option (ie how many days do they have to pay their outstanding invoices before they're suspended). The suspend feature was added in an older version of Jomres in preparation for this new functionality. When a manager is suspended their properties are unpublished until they are unsuspended.

Due to the number of forum posts about sizing images we've also added a couple of new options to the Uploads tab to configure max width and height sizes of thumbnails, and you can now size the property list and property header thumbnails independantly.

Well, v4.6 was a short lived release, it was all of 5 days old before it was superseded by Jomres 4.7.0 which is our Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 compatible release.

As you're probably aware, Joomla 1.6 was released today (www.joomla.org/16/) and as promised, Jomres has been brought up to date to work with it.

v4.7 has been uploaded to both the license and update servers. If you're running v4.6 or lower on Joomla 1.5 you should still upgrade because I found a security issue while testing on Joomla 1.6.

For those people who're dis-inclined to read the manual, I'll repeat something that's written there :

We've had a couple of people mention that they've seen that the SVN has been updated a lot, but we haven't yet released a new version of Jomres and they wanted to know why, so I thought I'd talk here about why that is.

For the last few weeks we've been working on a new free plugin for Jomres called The Auction House.

Today I have added Jintour, extended_maps and the local_events plugins to the Jomres plugin manager's library.

We're pleased to announce that Jomres 4.5.8 has been released. As well as the usual plethora of bug fixes, we also enjoy some new features, listed below.

Partner functionality

This is our initial implementation of a feature request to allow site managers to offer discounts to registered users, configurable in the Administration area. Whilst functional we have chosen to keep this first implementation relatively simple. By introducing features in stages we are able to review potential new functionality on an ongoing basis.

A new button has been added to the Administrator's control panel, appropriately enough called "Partners". Clicking on this button will take the administrator to the "Choose partner" page, where they can either choose an existing partner or add a new one by searching for the user's username in the provided input field. This uses jQuery UI's new auto-complete feature so when a list of usernames are offered in the dropdown box that appears after inputting a few characters and the administrator selects one the user is automatically added as a Partner and the administrator is taken to the Partner discounts page.

This page also uses the auto-complete feature to allow the administrator to search for properties via their property name (Not their translated name, so you must search on the name as entered in the Property Admin page)/street/town/region/postcode. Again a list of matches will be offered and the administrator will select one. When the property is selected it is added to the partner's portfolio, however they don't yet enjoy a discount. By default the discount's from and to dates are set to the past and the discount is set to 0. As a property is added to the portfolio it is added to the page with a link. Clicking this link will bring up a new option to configure the valid from/to dates and the amount of the discount. Click the Save button to apply your changes, or the Delete icon to remove the discount from the partner's porfolio.

Currently it's only possible to offer one discount and timespan to each property. We will monitor this and see if enough people ask for the ability to add further discounts to the same property depending on time periods, the functionality has been built to be extensible in this area if needed.

As already said, this first implementation is simple but functional. It is possible, depending on demand, that we will build the ability to create partner packages where partners can be allocated packages, and properties added to a package meaning that there is no need to assign properties directly to partners. This will be reviewed at a later time.

An important note. Partners can only be offered discounts in percent, they can't be offered flat rate discounts (like N euros off a booking). This is because properties can be in different countries, and whilst a 20 euro discount might be a significant amount to one parter, a similar 20 yen discount would be trivial. Therefore we've decided to keep discounts to percentages only, to keep the discount values logical.

Tours in Jomres.

If you've any patience, you've probably searched the Jomres.net forums to find out if Jomres supports tours. The search would turn up a number of discussions on what tours are, if they should be part of a normal hotel booking etc.

As a consequence of some of those discussions I wrote a plugin called Jintour, which allows a property manager to create resource profiles (called Tours within jintour) which allow you to create a resource that can be made available between two dates and have a certain number of spaces for adults and kids, and individual prices for each.

Jomres 4.5.5 has been released

Lots of bug fixes/tweaks to the system. Two changes of note are modifications to the booking form, so please ensure that your versions of dobooking.html and dobooking_srp.html (if you've modified them) incorporate the new changes. Ifyou're on Windows, remember that WinMerge is your friend when comparing files.

The wind is blowing, it's raining and everybody is looking forward to escaping to the Mediterranean, it must be summertime in Pembrokeshire again.

Renewal licenses are for those users who have already purchased a Plugin Download and Support license. A Renewal license allows you to download new versions of Jomres plugins, and gives you access to core plugins once your original download and support license has expired. Renewals can be purchased from here (if you are logged in) once you've already purchased a Jomres Developer license.

Prices are as follows :

£99.50 for 3 months
£199 for 6 months
£398 for 1 year

"Perpetual" users will not need to renew as their licenses are ongoing. All users who purchased before December 2009 effectively have "Perpetual" licenses.