Find a Surgeon Near You: a specialist search tool

Stack. React search app on the front end. PHP and SQL on the back end, as custom API endpoints across the client's two WordPress servers: the site server where the app runs, and a separate membership server. The two talked only through secured custom endpoints triggered by specific events, never a shared database, which kept them separate for security.

Where the surgeons come from. Surgeons signed up on the membership site to be listed, and only approved members became available to the search. Because the endpoints read the membership database directly on its own server, the client was free to use any membership plugin they liked to run sign-ups.

How a search runs. A visitor picked a country, surname and speciality, with a zip code option in the US, handled through the Zip API.us service. The site server made a secure call to the membership server, which ran a dynamic SQL query through a custom endpoint and returned the matching members. The endpoints also reshaped that data into the format the app needed, so the app never had to deal with how the membership plugin stored it.

Maps. Member addresses were stored as text (street number, street name and so on), not as GPS coordinates. When a visitor opened a surgeon's details, the Google Geolocation API converted the address to coordinates and the Google Maps API placed it on a map.

Timeline. About 2 months over two phases, 2021 and 2022.