Mr Porky – Custom WooCommerce Rebuild

Project Overview

The Mr Porky e-commerce website required a complete rebuild after its legacy WooCommerce installation became un-updatable and unstable.
The original developers had implemented the entire front-end in pure JavaScript, bypassing WooCommerce’s templating system entirely — leaving WordPress to act only as a data host for products, orders, and payments.

Anton was brought in to re-engineer the platform from the ground up, preserving all existing functionality while making the store update-safe, dynamic, and future-proof.

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Challenges & Analysis

The project presented multiple critical challenges:

• Every product and variation ID was hardcoded in HTML, meaning thousands of manual data references.
• The store ran on an obsolete WordPress 2.x version, incompatible with modern plugins or migration tools.
• Updates to WordPress or WooCommerce would break functionality immediately due to missing core dependencies.
• The theme used no native PHP templates, relying solely on front-end rendering.

The goal was to rebuild the system to use WooCommerce as it was intended, while retaining the original business logic and user experience.

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Technical Implementation

Architecture Rebuild

A new WooCommerce platform was developed on the Genesis Framework, chosen for its stability and maintainability.
Custom templates were created for every key component — product pages, variations, carts, and checkout — allowing WooCommerce to handle all business logic natively.

Code Refactoring

• Refactored 15,000 – 20,000 lines of legacy JavaScript into modular, update-safe functions integrated within WooCommerce templates.
• Replaced all hardcoded product IDs and variation data with dynamic database queries.
• Cleaned and normalized data for consistency across hundreds of products.

Data Migration

Because of the version gap (WordPress 2.x → 4.x), no migration plugins were compatible.
Anton wrote custom export and import routines, reconstructing product and taxonomy relationships manually across multiple MySQL tables.

Additional Work

• Created custom WooCommerce email templates (Order Received, Order Completed, etc.).
• Added new features and integrated additional product lines during the rebuild.
• Tested compatibility for all future core and plugin updates.

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Results & Impact

Metric	Before	After
Update Compatibility	Disabled	Fully compatible
Product Management	Manual (hardcoded)	Dynamic from DB
Codebase	Legacy JS only	Modular PHP + JS
Performance	Unstable	Optimized & maintainable

“Anton managed to take our completely broken custom setup and rebuild it into a professional WooCommerce platform that finally works — and updates flawlessly.”
— Project Feedback, Mr Porky Team

The rebuild restored full functionality and eliminated all technical debt, allowing future scalability, clean updates, and consistent performance.

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Project Summary

This project highlights Anton’s ability to reverse-engineer complex legacy codebases and migrate them into maintainable, standards-compliant systems.
The Mr Porky WooCommerce rebuild remains a textbook example of transitioning from a hardcoded environment to a fully dynamic and extensible platform — ensuring long-term sustainability for the client.