Deep in the Weeds: Migrating Legacy URL Slugs and Wrestling with 6,116 Files

Just wrapped up another marathon session tackling some gnarly technical debt. You know that feeling when you start with "simple cleanup" and end up elbow-deep in 182MB of legacy WordPress backups? Yeah, that was today.

Project Housekeeping First

Started the day doing some much-needed project organization. Created a proper .gitignore for the Projects folder (goodbye forever, random ZIP files and .DS_Store cruft), and built a little audit-structure.sh script that gives me a quick health check. All 16 checks passing clean now, which feels good.

Also moved a bunch of stray markdown files out of the honeybun root into proper docs folders. Small wins, but the kind that make future work so much smoother.

The Rabbit Hole: PBG Analysis

Here's where things got interesting. Analyzed a massive PBG WordPress backup - 182MB containing 6,116 files. The stack is Kadence theme + Elementor with a custom pbg-location-router plugin.

The fascinating part? Their geo URLs match HoneyBun's /service-areas/{county}/{city}/{venue}/ structure exactly. But the service URLs are different - they use /booths/{slug}/ and /services/{slug}/ instead of our current photo-booth-rental pattern.

This discovery sparked the main quest of the session...

The Great Slug Migration

Decided to align our URL patterns with the cleaner approach:

• Old: {name}-photo-booth-rental
• New: /booths/{name}/ and /services/{name}/
• Hub change: photo-booth-rentals → booths

Created a slick interactive reference page (vertical-slug-reference.html) with dark theme tabs covering all 13 verticals. It matches our existing design system and gives a nice overview of the 4 geo models we're using.

The PHP Template Gauntlet

This is where I'm currently stuck in the weeds. Started migrating 24 PHP template files to use the new slug patterns. Got through 13 files completely (footer, header, all the page templates, etc.), but there are still 11 files with 129 legacy occurrences to tackle.

The easy ones are knocked out. What's left are the heavy-hitters:

• bbs-config.php with 50 occurrences - all the core URL builder functions
• seo.php with 19 occurrences - schema generation and breadcrumbs
• Various API and plugin files that handle the deep routing logic

I've got detailed maps of what needs changing in each file, but this is definitely "next session" territory. The transformation rules are solid though:

• Made legacy regex optional with (?:photo-booth-rental-)? so both old and new slugs work during transition
• City URLs go from flat photo-booth-rental-{city}-{state} to hierarchical /service-areas/{county}/{city}/

What's Next

Left myself good breadcrumbs for pickup - a simple grep command will show exactly which files still need work, and I've got agent-mapped change lists for each one. The meta fast-path already exists in the SEO code, just needs to be connected to the other functions.

Sometimes these deep infrastructure sessions feel like archaeology - digging through layers of legacy decisions to build something cleaner. But when it's done, every future feature will be that much easier to build.

All changes are still local, nothing committed yet. Want to finish the PHP migration and test thoroughly before pushing. The beauty of working in the open - you get to see both the messy middle and the clean end result.