ThemeREX Auto Dealer

ThemeREX Auto Dealer is a complete vehicle inventory plugin built for dealerships, classifieds sites, and automotive marketplaces.

It registers a trx_ad_listing custom post type that handles cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats, RVs, ATVs, and commercial vehicles in a single inventory. Every standard vehicle attribute — make, model, year, mileage, condition, fuel type, transmission, drivetrain, body style, color, price, and 30+ more — has first-class admin UI, taxonomies, REST endpoints, and Gutenberg/Elementor surfacing.

Free features

• Vehicle CPT with 10 specialised taxonomies (make, model, body style, fuel type, transmission, drivetrain, condition, color, vehicle type, features)
• Dealer CPT with logo, location, contact, and hours
• 16 Gutenberg blocks (Search Form, Vehicle Grid, Vehicle Card, Specs Table, Contact Form, Dealer Info, Single Listing, Media Slider, Specs Highlights, Similar Vehicles, Recently Viewed, Featured Carousel, Favorites List, Compare Link, Comparison Table, Map View)
• 17 Elementor widgets covering all the above + theme-builder conditions for “All Vehicles” / “All Dealers” (full list in the Elementor Widgets section below)
• 10 dynamic tags for Elementor — bind any text widget to VIN/Make/Model/Year/Mileage/Price/Fuel/Status/Gallery/Dealer
• 4 starter block patterns — inventory page, single vehicle, dealer landing, search hero
• AJAX-powered archive filters (price range, year range, mileage range, body style, fuel type, condition, dealer, status, featured, accident-free)
• Server-side aggregation cache with event-driven invalidation
• Custom DB table wp_trx_ad_vehicle_specs for sub-200ms search response on up to 5,000 listings
• REST API endpoints: /vehicles, /vehicles/{id}, /dealers, /dealers/{id}, /models?make=N, /search-options, /forms/submit, /leads, /vehicles/{id}/pdf
• PDF spec sheet generation via Dompdf (free)
• QR code on listing edit screen via chillerlan/php-qrcode (free)
• Compare bar + favorites (localStorage, no login required)
• Recently viewed strip
• Similar vehicles widget (3-tier heuristic: body+condition → make → body alone)
• EV-specific fields (battery capacity, range, charge time)
• schema.org structured data — Car, Vehicle, Motorcycle, Offer, AutoDealer, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage
• SEO-plugin compatibility — Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, AEO Optimizer, or standalone
• Lead capture forms — inquiry, test-drive, callback, finance, trade-in
• Auto-reply email to customer + dealer notification with merge tags
• Per-IP rate limit (3/hour/listing) to deter spam
• /llms.txt AI-crawler discovery file (standalone mode)
• WPML + Polylang i18n support
• Bulk admin actions (mark available, sold, reserved, coming soon, feature, unfeature)
• Quick-edit featured toggle
• Vehicle specifications panel covering 29 non-taxonomy spec fields

Pro Version

ThemeREX Auto Dealer Pro is a separate plugin, distributed from themerex.net, that runs alongside this free plugin (the free plugin is fully functional on its own and keeps running independently). The Pro plugin adds:

Multi-dealer marketplace

• trx_ad_dealer + trx_ad_agent user roles with curated capabilities
• Data isolation — dealers see only their own listings + leads
• Per-listing analytics (views, calls, WhatsApp taps, inquiries) with cookie-debounced view tracking
• Dealer performance dashboard + dealer directory shortcode
• Social proof counters (X people viewed today)
• Dealer response-time badge

Lead CRM

• trx_ad_lead CPT auto-captures every inquiry, call, WhatsApp tap, and test-drive request
• 5-state status workflow (new → contacted → qualified → closed_won/lost) with auto-logged transitions
• Internal notes with timestamps
• Per-dealer email notification routing (Reply-To customer)
• HMAC-SHA256 signed outbound webhooks
• CSV export with active list filters respected

Sales-driving features

• WooCommerce integration — reservation deposits + per-listing fees + paid featured listings (7/14/30-day tiers)
• Geo radius search + saved searches + daily email digest + Web Push notifications (VAPID-signed)
• Test-drive booking with calendar UI + per-dealer hours
• Price tracking + “Reduced by $X” badge + single-page sparkline

Inventory power tools

• CSV import + export with 3-mode duplicate handling (skip / update / replace)
• XML import + export
• Scheduled imports (WP-Cron)
• VIN decoder (NHTSA + bring-your-own paid API)
• AI listing description generator (bring-your-own OpenAI key)
• 4 marketplace feed adapters (Facebook Marketplace, AutoTrader, AutoScout24, Mobile.de) with per-dealer feed keys
• AEO/GEO optimization — agent-discoverable schema, AI-bot policy, sitemap variants
• Per-listing layout overrides (Gutenberg / Elementor / default)
• Custom field schema editor + frontend renderer + CSV bridge
• Multisite network-wide settings

Full details, screenshots, and FAQ: themerex.net/trx-auto-dealer. The Pro plugin installs alongside the free one; the free plugin stays installed — Pro hooks into its registered modules via do_action( 'trx_ad_register_modules' ), so deactivating Pro safely reverts to free behavior with no data loss.

Why a custom DB table?

Performance. WordPress’s postmeta table indexes by post_id + meta_key but not by meta_value, so a filter like “Toyota Camry, 2018-2022, under $25k, under 60k miles” forces ten cross-joins against postmeta — fast at 50 listings, painfully slow at 5,000.

This plugin maintains a denormalised wp_trx_ad_vehicle_specs table with one row per listing and ~55 indexed columns. The taxonomies remain the source of truth (you can change a make’s slug and it updates everywhere); the specs row is rebuilt automatically by a save_post_trx_ad_listing hook. Search queries hit the specs table directly via a single SQL statement.

The table is rebuilt idempotently on plugin upgrade and on demand via a re-sync helper.

Privacy

The free plugin does NOT phone home. No telemetry, no opt-in dialogs, no remote analytics.

The lead capture form sends submissions via wp_mail() to the configured admin email — same channel WordPress uses for password resets. Outbound HTTP requests from the free plugin: none by default. If you enable a map provider, map tiles and geocoding requests occur as documented in the “External services” section below; with the default “Disabled” setting no request ever leaves your site.

The Pro plugin adds VIN decoder (sends VIN to NHTSA over HTTPS, opt-in per request), AI description generator (sends a prompt to OpenAI’s API using YOUR API key, opt-in per request), and outbound webhook (sends lead data to a customer-configured URL, opt-in per webhook). All are off by default.

Elementor Widgets

Every plugin feature is available as a native Elementor widget — no shortcode wrappers. The 17 widgets ship in the free plugin under an “Auto Dealer” category in the Elementor panel:

• Vehicle Search Form — AJAX search with configurable filter fields
• Vehicle Grid — filterable, paginated inventory grid
• Vehicle Card — single vehicle teaser card with type-ahead vehicle picker
• Single Listing — full vehicle detail layout for theme builders
• Vehicle Specs Table — complete specification table
• Vehicle Specs Highlights — configurable key-specs strip
• Vehicle Media Slider — gallery/video slider with thumbnails
• Featured Carousel — featured vehicles carousel
• 360° View — interactive exterior spin viewer
• Contact Form — inquiry / test-drive / callback / finance / trade-in forms
• Listing Form — frontend vehicle submission form
• Dealer Info — dealer profile card (logo, contact, hours, map link)
• Dealer Directory — dealer grid with listing counts
• Map View — vehicle/dealer map (Leaflet or Google Maps)
• Favorites List — visitor’s saved vehicles
• Compare Link — header-ready compare counter link
• Comparison Bar — sticky compare bar with slide-in comparison table

Plus 10 dynamic tags (VIN, Make, Model, Year, Mileage, Price, Fuel, Status, Gallery, Dealer) for binding any Elementor text/image widget to vehicle data, and theme-builder display conditions for vehicle and dealer archives.

Third-party assets and licenses

Bundled vendor packages, all GPL-compatible:

• Dompdf (LGPL 2.1) — PDF generation for vehicle spec sheets
• chillerlan/php-qrcode (MIT) — QR code rendering on listing edit screen
• Masterminds/html5 (MIT) — HTML5 parsing helper used by Dompdf
• phenx/php-font-lib (LGPL 2.1) and phenx/php-svg-lib (LGPL 3.0) — Dompdf font/SVG support
• sabberworm/php-css-parser (MIT) — CSS parsing helper used by Dompdf
• composer/autoload — Composer autoloader (MIT)

All PDF/QR/search processing happens on your server. The optional map features contact external services as documented below.

External services

This plugin can connect to the following external services. None of them are contacted unless you enable the corresponding feature; no service is used with the default settings.

OpenStreetMap Nominatim (geocoding)
Used to convert a dealer’s street address into map coordinates so the dealer can be shown on a map. Contacted only when you set Settings → Maps → Map Provider to “OpenStreetMap (Leaflet)”: when a dealer is saved without coordinates, the dealer’s address (street, city, state, postcode, country) and your site URL (sent as the User-Agent, as required by Nominatim’s usage policy) are sent to nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Results are cached for 30 days. No visitor data is ever sent.
Service by the OpenStreetMap Foundation: Nominatim usage policy, OSMF privacy policy.

OpenStreetMap tiles (map display)
When the OpenStreetMap provider is enabled, map images (tiles) are loaded in the visitor’s browser from tile.openstreetmap.org, which receives the visitor’s IP address and the map area being viewed, as with any embedded map.
OSMF Tile Usage Policy, OSMF privacy policy.

Google Maps Platform (map display and geocoding)
Contacted only when you set Map Provider to “Google Maps” and enter your own Google API key. The Maps JavaScript API is loaded in the visitor’s browser (Google receives the visitor’s IP address and map interactions), and dealer addresses are sent to the Google Geocoding API with your API key when a dealer is saved without coordinates.
Google Terms of Service, Google Privacy Policy.