Jomres 9.9.0 is now available through your CMS's update feature.

It's been a few months since 9.8.28, and we can assure you it's been worth the wait.

There're a ton of changes in this version, a lot of files have been renamed, administrator menus restructured and all round juicy stuff done. If you have customised any Jomres files, I strongly advise that you test the update on a development server first as some of these changes might trip you up if you've been a bit wild with your file editors.

So, what's changed?

Well, to start with there are a loads of changes relating to how Jomres works in it's underlying structure. When you upgrade you should see that Jomres is quite a bit quicker. We've trimmed the fat everywhere we could identify it, and we're sure you'll agree that it's absolutely blindingly quick now.

Next, you should see that the administrator menu structure has changed quite a bit. To make the system easier to manage all settings now have been moved to the Site Configuration area, the Site Structure menu option is gone ( room types, property types etc are under Settings now ) and menu images have been replaced with FontAwesome icons, which again improves performance.

Warnings have been moved to the top of the control panel to improve their prominence, you'd be amazed the number of people who would ask us about something that had been highlighted in the warnings section but they'd somehow missed them (you know who you are!) so hopefully that'll help.

 

In the plugin manager there are a few new plugins, including a new Access Control plugin, which you can use to control who can access which tasks. This will please quite a few of our users as it's a less ambiguous than the older Access Control functionality. In this version menu options and their related tasks are tightly linked for this purpose.

There are also some new "Template Package" plugins, which allow us to deliver customised, specific templates through the plugin manager. Once installed, under Settings you'll have access to a new Template Package manager where you can choose specific templates to use. Note that these override both the Jomres Core templates, and those in the CMS's template override directory. You will need to specifically activate individual templates if you want to use them. Pay no attention the current styling of these new templates, we will improve them later if the feature proves popular.

Frontend changes

The most obvious change in the frontend is that the menus have been updated. They now use FontAwesome icons, instead of the older images, again this will help performance.

The next thing you'll notice is that the Dashboard has new availability percentage radial graphs. These help you to see at a glance how busy your rooms will be for the next week.

If you have the Overview plugin installed, you can now see the Overview output in the Dashboard page ( enable this through the Site Configuration ).

We're pleased as punch that our boutique hotel users are now able to add descriptions and a tagline for individual rooms. This has been requested on and off for several years and we're glad that this has finally made it's way into the system.

Another feature that I've tried to find the time to add almost since Jomres was first conceived, is the guest Blacklist feature. This allows property managers to blacklist specific guests ( perhaps they were rude to staff, or caused some damage). Blacklisted guests can't book properties, instead if they try to book they're redirected to the Contact form for that property. This allows the guest to still book other properties, and it also enables you to keep the channel open so that you can resolve whatever issues caused them to be blacklisted in the first place.

What should I do if I've customised some files?

It really depends on what you've changed. The template files themselves haven't been modified much, so that's not likely to cause you any problems. If, however, you've modified some of the scripts that normally live in the core-minicomponents directory then you should follow best practices and thoroughly test all of your changes on a development server before applying the update to your live server.

Documentation

I'm well aware that with all these changes, the Jomres manual is now hideously out of date. Don't worry, over the next few weeks we'll be working hard to bring that up to date with the current version of Jomres. Our existing users shouldn't have too many problems, however. You're intelligent folks and with this refactor settings will be easier to find than ever.

We want stats! We want stats!

As mentioned elsewhere, this has been an absolutely huge update. There have been 225 commits since the last release, 1,434 changed files with 167,001 additions and 209,453 deletions. 118 plugins were updated or added, and every language file has had all redundant language strings removed from the file ( each file had about 400 redundant line, and there are about 79 individual language files, sadly not all up-to-date). Including all plugins, to date Jomres consists of approximately 650,000 lines of code.

 

Happy booking folks,

Vince Wooll & Aladar Barthi.