Scalable Dealer Locator Development for US & Canada on WordP...

A North American animal nutrition brand needed a dealer locator that could scale from 9 Canadian provinces to all 50 US states without bolting on a third-party SaaS map plugin. Existing implementation was a static page with broken pin rendering and no geographic structure.

I architected and shipped a fully custom solution: a dealer custom post type backed by a hierarchical dealer_cat taxonomy (labeled "Provinces" for the existing CA-first audience), CMB2 fields for dealer metadata, and a front-end finder UI integrated into the existing custom theme. Geographic terms were structured hierarchically so future region-level grouping (e.g. Northeast US vs. Mountain West) wouldn't require schema changes. Deployed via Pantheon's standard Dev → Test → Live SFTP pipeline.

Stack: WordPress on Pantheon, custom post type + hierarchical taxonomy, CMB2, custom theme integration, multi-environment SFTP deploy.

Outcome: Shipped dealer-finder live to production, expanded geographic coverage from 9 provinces to 9 provinces + 50 US states, fixed pin rendering, and gave the client a structure they can grow into without a rebuild.

Tags: WordPress, custom development, Pantheon, CPT, taxonomy, CMB2, dealer locator