Code Archaeology Day: Digging Through HoneyBun's Photo Booth Logic

Sometimes the best coding sessions are the ones where you don't write a single line of code. Today was one of those days—pure detective work.

The Great Photo Booth Audit

I spent the morning doing what every developer dreads but secretly loves: code archaeology. Had some nagging doubts about whether "photo booth" was hardcoded in places it shouldn't be across our HoneyBun system.

Turns out my paranoia was unfounded (this time). After auditing all 4 modified files, everything checks out:

• The "photo-booth" references in front-page.php are just routing logic—default values and guard conditions
• The hardcoded stuff in page-home.php is actually photo booth-specific content in a photo booth-only template
• Other verticals have their own page-home.php files and never touch this code
• Even that sketchy-looking preg_replace for event names is safe—it's a no-op on non-photo booth data

Architecture Reality Check

Also had a moment of clarity about what we're actually building. I keep calling HoneyBun "headless" but that's not quite right. WordPress is still doing server-side rendering—it owns the routing, page structure, and HTML output. Our Cloudflare Workers are providing data and pre-computed fragments.

So the correct label is: "WordPress with a decoupled content/render API." Not as buzzword-y as "headless" but way more accurate.

The Satisfaction of Clean Repos

Both repositories are squeaky clean and pushed. No uncommitted changes lurking around to bite me later. The MMB hero subtitle is still looking good, the lessons dashboard is humming along with 219 entries from Supabase, and all 4 files propagated correctly to the golden app.

What's Next

Found one more content bug to squash: the hp-cities-desc fallback text in page-home.php is still talking about "From the Inland Empire to Orange County..." when it should be location-appropriate for MMB. That's my next target.

Also thinking about expanding the worker lessons tag whitelist to include seo, css, html, a11y and friends. The current setup feels a bit restrictive.

Sometimes the most productive sessions are the ones where you just make sure everything actually works as intended. Today was one of those days.