We created the Locator feature in 2012 as a way for website with multiple churches to list all their locations on one map and this was used up to 2019 by the 2 Church of England Dioceses that were using Church Edit at the time. It was also used for the Neighbourhood Prayer Network as a map showing which streets around the UK were being prayed for.
Over the years there have been various changes to the mapping system by Google which required redevelopments or adjustments to their API keys. This has always taken up development resources to meet the new requirements, for what is a feature that is not wildly used. Following our work recently with many new Church of England Dioceses we created a separate specialist mapping system that works with the Church of England's A Church Near You website.
We've spent the last 15 months developing the biggest update to Church Edit and will be releasing this over the coming months. This is a major and exciting update but as part of the update we have had to refactor every part of the Church Edit software and as such have taken the decision to withdraw the Locator from Church Edit in November 2021.
However there is now a way that you can create a mapping system directly with Google and we've created a guide for those clients that do want to display multiple locations on the one Google Map.