Blōwan (Old English)

Proto-Germanic *blōanan ("to flower, blossom, flourish, prosper").

Jomres 10.7 is almost finished. It's been developed in conjunction with the new Jomres Joomla Portal Quickstart, named Blowan.

There are a significant number of additions to Jomres for 10.7, so this will be quite a long update.

Blōwan

Jomres is flourishing, and I wanted to reflect this in the name of the new Quickstart.

It's built on the Helix Ultimate framework template from Joomlashine. It includes SP Page Builder, and comes with 47 modules, of which 23 are pre-configured search forms using the new Search Form Elements plugin.

I don't want to force my users to purchase more software than they may not otherwise need, so I've stuck to using just free Joomshaper extensions in the Quickstart. If you can afford it, I highly recommend you consider updating to the Pro version as there are a lot of toys included which make building your sites easier.

Because my users may not want to use the Helix Framework when building their sites, I haven't added any Jomres page builder blocks. Instead, like previous versions of Jomres, most of the modules and other output are constructed from Jomres Shortcodes. This means that you are not forced to use Helix if you don't want to. It's an option, but not the only one. You can uninstall Helix, switch to another template framework and still use Jomres.

The Quickstart is built to demonstrate that Jomres can be used for more than just Property Rentals. There are categories for cars, yachts and the new Item Hire property type (more on that later in this article). As a result I've provided a lot of override code in the /templates/shaper_helixultimate/html/com_jomres/ directory to show you how to capitalise on the powerful Jomres framework by overriding scripts, template files and more.

The Quickstart will be released when Jomres 10.7 is released, it's currently being tested.

Jomres 10.7

Overrides

 In this version there's been a strong emphasis on allowing you to override almost everything in Jomres. For many years you've been able to override minicomponents, classes and template files, however a lot has been added. 

 Before you start attempting to override files, first you need to learn where the override directory is. This is how you find it.

A previously little documented feature allowed you to have property type specific overrides for template files, and now you can have property type specific minicomponent overrides.

Why?

People use Jomres for more than just hotels and villas. I wanted to reflect that powerful functionality in the new Blōwan Quickstart, however it irked me that if somebody used an SRP (villa/cottage/apartment) property type to rent out items like cars or yachts, they'd still see configuration tabs for properties like villas, such as the Supplements tabs. Now, j00501suppliments.class.php could have been overridden in the templates/TEMPLATENAME/html/com_jomres/custom_code directory, but that would mean that villas/cottages/apartments would no longer have access to that configuration tab.

Property type specific minicomponent overrides mean you can now put a copy of j00501suppliments.class.php (or any other minicomponent) into a subdirectory of /html/com_jomres that corresponds to the property type id (e.g. /html/com_jomres/3/ for cars), edit it to remove any configuration settings you don't want to show and now managers of cars won't see settings that don't make sense for them to see.

Function & Class Overrides

You can now override (almost) all of the Jomres functions and classes. To be fair, the latter was already a feature, but the former, the function overrides is new.

CSS & Javascript

Likewise, all of the CSS and Javascript files can be overridden now.

Router override

Joomla only. The Jomres Joomla router.php file can now be overridden. This is useful if you want a different url structure within the Jomres portion of your site.

Access Control Override

Going back to the need for the property type specific minicomponent overrides above, I knew that there would also be menu options available for cars, for example, that didn't need to be in the Jomres main menu when the manager is viewing a car type property.

Enter Access Control Overrides.

This feature allows you to control which property type sees which menu options. The main raison d'etre is to simplify the menu options depending on the property type currently being administered by the property manager, however like always I'm sure that people will find other ways to use this feature.

New Property Type Setting : Item Hire

I am constantly being asked if Jomres can be used for things other than just hotels, villas etc. While my answer is always Yes, sometimes the code needs to be customised to make it entirely seamless.

The new Item Hire property type is designed to make this process much easier. When a property is created as an Item Hire type property, internally the system creates an MRP (rooms in the property can be booked) but guest numbers in settings and the booking form are ignored. In the Tool Hire Centres example on the Blōwan Quickstart Demo, these rooms are now renamed to Tools. Admittedly, the language files will still refer to Rooms and Properties, which are now Tools and Hire Centres, but more on that in a moment.

Language Context Feature

Back in the day, Jomres had a feature where when a property type was created a new language file, which was a copy of whichever language file was being used when the property type was created, would be copied into a subdirectory of the /jomres/languages/ directory. Then, whenever a property of a certain type was being displayed, then that language file would be used. It was useful to be able to display different phrases, depending on the property type being shown.

This feature worked well, but it had one major drawback in that when Jomres was updated site admins generally wouldn't know that they were actually using a language file in a subdirectory that wouldn't be updated at the same time. As a result they'd see strange strings in the page that refered to missing language definitions that were in the Core lang file, but not the one they were actually using. In approximately 2017 I had to disable this feature because I didn't have the bandwidth at the time to work on it.

In Jomres 10.7 the feature is back.

It has been revised, updated and expanded, but without the new language files being created.

If you go to the Translate Language File Strings page in the administrator area you will now see a dropdown at the top of the page called Language Context.

language context

 The page still works like it did before, however now when you change the Context, you'll be saving the changes to the database and associating the changes with a property type.

You can see the context in the List Property Types page. The language context string shouldn't have any spaces or special characters.

image78

Going back to the new Item Hire property type mentioned above, we can now display language strings that are specific to Tool Hire Centres (or whatever you name your Item Hire property types) and Site Administrators can easily modify newly added strings by visiting the Translate Language File Strings page.

This feature of course works on existing property types, such as cars, yachts etc, and with different languages.

Animation Library

In Site Configuration there is a new tab Animation Library, which uses AOS.

A nice bit of bling for my faithful users. The configuration tab allows you to set the animation, the duration and the easing type. Now when properties are displayed using the basic_module_output.html template then there's some lovely animation shown as they fade into view.

It has been used (not, I hope, too liberally) in existing Bootstrap 5 templates, for example here :

<div class="card mb-3 border-0" {jomres_script animation_library}>

You could do the same in Bootstrap 3 template files, although I haven't tried it and I have no intention of updating them any more.

Because it's a Jomres script, you could also do something like

<div class="card mb-3 border-0" {jomres animation_library}>

in an article or module, in theory, although I haven't tried it. If you do, let me know how you get on with it.

Other Changes

I am genuinely excited by this new version of Jomres. These new features mean that you can easily mix and match any type of booking property on your site.

With the addition of the Item Hire property types, the language context feature and the ability to override everything down to the level of having different script behaviour for different property types, I'm convinced that Jomres Core will become the only component you need  for renting anything out.

There are scores of other changes to Jomres. I have highlighted the main changes coming in the new version. For more indepth views, please do see the changelog once 10.7 has been formally released. There are quite a few PHP8.x related changes, if you update and find that there are any issues the first thing you should do is visit Administrator > Jomres > Tools > Library packages and follow the onscreen instructions to update the packages. If, for whatever reason, you can't do that then use FTP to delete the /jomres/libraries/packages directory. Jomres will then re-download the packages automatically.

The Site Designer's and Developer's guide has had a lot of work done to it to detail the new additions, as well as moving a few things around so that it's a little bit better organised. Remember, that document is also available as a PDF so you can download it if you need to, and even print it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ABOUT US

vince picDeveloped and maintained by Vince Wooll, Jomres was initially conceived in early 2005 as a Mambo based solution to a client’s hotel management needs. While it wasn't originally expected to be an online booking system it quickly morphed into one as users requested more and more features.

As the number of feature requests grew Vince knew that he would need to dedicate more time to the project and in July 2005 Jomres was released as a commercial project. Since then Jomres has become the world's oldest online booking plugin for any PHP CMS. It has been used in Joomla 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 3 & 4 and WordPress 4, 5 & 6.

Aladar joined the project in 2010 after using Jomres for his own projects. He was active on the forum, helping other members of the community and eventually Vince invited him to join the team. Between 2010 and 2018 he was an integral part of the project and made many significant contributions.

Whilst not formally part of the Jomres project, Rodrigo Rocco and Vince have become firm friends. Rod is a freelancer who specialises in doing custom work for Jomres users and developing custom plugins for the system that take advantage of it's modular design. He has built many useful extensions including his fabulous Valentina Template Override Package.

Jomres and the Jomres Logo is trademarked and can't be used without written consent from the owner.

www.jomres.net is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla! Project, Open Source Matters or the WordPress project. The Joomla! & WordPress names and logos are used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters and the WordPress Projects.

© Copyright 2005 - 2022 Vince Wooll