I have a business site hosted on wordpress. Now, we are planning to have a store locator page. We are looking to build something similar to Apple store locator.
My question is how do we go about creating this? Should I build a plugin or is it possible to embed a php application and have the same “look & feel” as the site? Or can I make use of custom post types?
Please note that, the address info, working hours and images will be stored on the DB.Ideas and suggests are welcome.
Thanks in advance.
You should be able to do this completely with custom post types. Most of the structured info can go in custom fields.
For the geographical info you can read “Optimizing a Proximity-based Store Location Search on a Shared Web Host?“, where I explained how to store the coordinates of the stores not only in the
postmetatable but also in a separate indexed table to allow quick lookups. Another user of this site packaged this functionality in his Geo Data Store plugin, you can also take a look at that.