Introduction
The Jomres ASAModule plugin for Joomla is a plugin which allows you to call certain tasks as modules.
Available for Joomla & Wordpress. This article assumes that you're familiar with modules/widgets, positioning and publishing them.
Background
Many plugins in Jomres can be called as discreet "tasks". These are typically plugins where a minicomponent is numbered "06000". They were written as such to allow us to develop new functionality without needing to edit jomres.php to enable them to be called. An example of a discreet task would be the Remote Access of the calendar functionality, where you can access the availability of a calendar by passing a task of "remoteavailability" and the id of the property who's calendar you want to see.
This functionality has been around for quite a while, however the creation of the Jomres ASAmodule means that many of these tasks can be called in module positions on pages which are not typically Jomres pages.
A working example
Sticking with the remoteavailability example (which isn't ideal as a module because of it's size, but nevertheless it's a good example), we'll talk you through using jomres_asamodule.
First, you'll need to go to the Jomres Plugin manager and install the "Alternative Init" plugin. This is required by Jomres ASAmodule because it sets up various Jomres files that are needed to run minicomponents.
Next, in the plugin manager again, install jomres_asamodule. This installs a special module into Joomla. Now go to Joomla Module Manager and click the New button on the top right of the page. Next, you need to click the "Jomres AsAModule" link. This will take you to the module configuration page. Give your module a title (for example "Availability") and ensure that the position is appropriate for your template. On the right hand side, you now need to choose a task and any arguments. For the remote availability functionality, you'll set the task to "remoteavailability" and the arguments to "&id=1" (where 1 is the property's unique id. You can see this in the property selection dropdown on the manager's toolbar in the frontend). If the task in question requires more arguments, they'd follow the pattern "&a=1&b=2&c=3", which is exactly what you'd see in the address bar of your browser.
Click Save (make sure the module is published/enabled) and go to your site's main page. You should now see the availability calendar in a module.
Configuration screenshots
ASAModule configuration for the Ajax Search Composite in Wordpress :
ASAModule configuration for Ajax Search Composite in Joomla :
You can use the Administrator area page Shortcode Developer tool to see some tasks that can be called. If in doubt, see the plugin's page in the manual or in the description in the Jomres Plugin Manager as that will always have the most recent information.