We’ve just released 5.6.5 which is a minor release mainly aimed at the new changes in Google’s Maps API policy, requiring all new sites to start supplying an API key in order to produce maps.

This was a sudden announcement by Google with no advanced warning, though it seems that only sites starting to use Google Maps from June 22 onwards are mostly affected (for example, we haven’t added an API key to our demo site yet).

Google still offers a free API key if your site serves up to 25,000 maps a day, which should suffice for most. We suggest you take a look at their grandfathering plan for sites using Maps before their cut-off date, and we’d suggest getting an API key anyway to avoid any sudden surprises.

Here’s a list of changes to the plugin:

• added option to add Google Maps API key (located in Events > Settings > Formatting > Maps)
• fixed category image uploader not working properly on some specific setups
• fixed display issues of first/last names mixing middle names in booking admin tables under no-user mode
• fixed #_TAGSLUG not being parsed
• fixed blank space in email triggering validation errors when booking
• fixed ‘view bookings’ ticket link pointing to back-end when on front-end