I’ve written plenty of times (and have plenty of case studies) encouraging the development of custom content “libraries” — landing pages for a collection of content items that use filter and search controls to let users explore.
When designing this kind of user experience, it’s important to think about the user journey. When searching through content, what is the user looking for? What are their next steps?
If the custom content has location data, is the user interested in finding locations closest to them, or getting directions?
In a recent project (full case study coming soon), one of the custom content types is medical facility locations. This is a great example of a custom content archive page that needs geographic search functionality. As you can see in the video demo below, we added a geographic search field that autocompletes US places and addresses, and allows users to set a radius in which to search. This can be combined with other filters, in this case, a list of services available at each location.
If you’re interested in implementing something like this on your own site, the tools used here at ACF Pro and WP Gridbuilder with the Map facet add-on, used in combination with the Google Geolocation, Geocoding, and Places APIs.
