About a year ago Google started charging for their Google Maps. And quite a lot. We pay for all the maps on our demo websites and to be honest I’d be happy to stop these payments.
Luckily there’s a great alternative that you can use – OpenStreetMaps. Citadela includes support for both map providers Google and OpenStreetMaps. Therefore you have an option to make your website free of any additional monthly fees by using solely OpenStreetMaps.
OpenStreetMaps work great, look good and are becoming the new standard for websites. Yes, they look a bit different and maybe dated, but in my opinion they just look different.
If you still want to use Google Maps, you can but be careful. Few weeks ago Google introduced a new policy which disallows you to use both Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps on the same page. So be careful how you use Citadela blocks. Just don’t put OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps blocks on the same page. That’s it.
I hope you get this article useful. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below. For further information about maps feature please visit our online documentation.
Hello,
every alternative map to Google Map is nice. But also OpenStreetMaps sendes COOKIES to servers like google mals (as far as I know). So both needs to have a Cookie Blocker before they can be used on the website.
A usp will be, if you, AIT, integrate a cookie blocker for google, openstreet map, fontawesome and google fonts.
Cause all need to be blocked cause of DSGVO / GDPR before they can be used on the site.
Thanks,
Denis
Hello Denis,
We have discussed with our development team and in fact we are not sure what exactly did you mean.. Do you want us to add some confirmation window to the plugin before any map, google font, fontawesome starts loading? First we should manage to display a completely empty window with a request to confirm cookies and then the theme will load the whole page with google fonts and fontawesome otherwise it would look completely broken until it confirms it …?
Secondly, it looks like Google did once set those cookies, but doesn’t seem to any more (and not for some time now).
Google has a page detailing its compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/maps-controller-terms/
Kindest regards!
Zlatko
AIT team