Hi, Russ.
Thanks for your interest in our plugin suite.
1)
It sounds like you’d be interested in our Community Events (CE) add-on so your site visitors can create new events via the front-end instead of wp-admin.
If a logged-in WordPress user creates a new event via the CE front-end form, they’re assigned as the Author of the Event post; therefore, they can edit it.
Although I haven’t tested it, a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/co-authors-plus/ might work with our plugin — with or without Community Events. If you give it a try, I’d expect it to require you to add the 2nd Author via wp-admin but once that’s assigned, then it could possibly work in CE’s front-end form.
2)
Our Events Calendar PRO add-on enables Map View. Here’s a demo: http://wpshindig.com/events/map/ — you can see a “Near” field in the search box on Map View.
Last but not least, we have a pretty great Refund Policy so you can buy one or many of our add-ons and thoroughly test them.
I hope this info helps. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.