CES NuWiki Special Pages was a vBulletin software plugin developed by Cracked Egg Studios that extended the features of NuHit's NuWiki, and became the precursor to VaultWiki. It was developed beginning April 20, 2007, and published on August 21, 2007, at vbulletin.org.
This plugin made a number of improvements to NuWiki, including:
Very little information remains regarding the development of CES NuWiki Special Pages. Several months after CES VaultWiki was released in 2008, staff removed numerous references to CES NuWiki Special Pages from crackedeggstudios.com in order to avoid new customers conflating the two products. Prior to their deletion, the direct development notes contained 146 entries (issue #28), with numerous indirect notes in other deleted issues. Since the studio archives contain no known database backups prior to 2009, the information is considered to be lost. What information is available has been compiled from secondary sources, such as archived threads at vbulletin.org, archived threads at nuhit.com, and sporadic caches at Wayback Machine.
According to archived data, this plugin was supposedly announced at crackedeggstudios.com on May 9, 2007, but no news article from that time survives or is in any backup prior to VaultWiki moving to its own web site in 2010. Surviving wiki revisions from that time show that development was already mentioned in the page about The Vault as early as April 22, 2007, far from an announcement. The earliest known true announcement of CES NuWiki Special Pages was posted on nuhit.com on August 2, 2007.
The last version of CES NuWiki Special Pages to be published publicly was 1.0.1 on August 21, 2007. Development continued on a new version with additional features into February 2008. By that time, NuWiki's lead developer ElfMage mysteriously disappeared, and users had already begun approaching Cracked Egg Studios on February 12, 2008, to take over NuWiki.
Cracked Egg Studios released private betas of CES NuWiki Special Pages to select NuWiki users on April 16, 2008, and May 13, 2008, who had donated to Cracked Egg Studios to continue developing features as add-ons to NuWiki. However, around May 24, 2008, the voices requesting that Cracked Egg Studios release a product that didn't have a defunct dependency won out.
Cracked Egg Studios further extended CES NuWiki Special Pages, rewriting and rebranding it as VaultWiki, a competing product to NuWiki. VaultWiki launched June 15, 2008 at crackedeggstudios.com.
This plugin made a number of improvements to NuWiki, including:
- Improved performance by reducing MySQL queries
- Added a wiki syntax parser, ala MediaWiki, to wiki content
- Allowed third-party developers to extend the wiki parser using vBulletin-based plugins
- Introduced namespaces so that multiple wiki pages could have similar names
- Introduced Special pages to sort wiki content and provide statistics
- Introduced friendly URLs to wiki content that included the pages' names
- Tracked internal wiki link connections to help guide wiki growth
Very little information remains regarding the development of CES NuWiki Special Pages. Several months after CES VaultWiki was released in 2008, staff removed numerous references to CES NuWiki Special Pages from crackedeggstudios.com in order to avoid new customers conflating the two products. Prior to their deletion, the direct development notes contained 146 entries (issue #28), with numerous indirect notes in other deleted issues. Since the studio archives contain no known database backups prior to 2009, the information is considered to be lost. What information is available has been compiled from secondary sources, such as archived threads at vbulletin.org, archived threads at nuhit.com, and sporadic caches at Wayback Machine.
According to archived data, this plugin was supposedly announced at crackedeggstudios.com on May 9, 2007, but no news article from that time survives or is in any backup prior to VaultWiki moving to its own web site in 2010. Surviving wiki revisions from that time show that development was already mentioned in the page about The Vault as early as April 22, 2007, far from an announcement. The earliest known true announcement of CES NuWiki Special Pages was posted on nuhit.com on August 2, 2007.
The last version of CES NuWiki Special Pages to be published publicly was 1.0.1 on August 21, 2007. Development continued on a new version with additional features into February 2008. By that time, NuWiki's lead developer ElfMage mysteriously disappeared, and users had already begun approaching Cracked Egg Studios on February 12, 2008, to take over NuWiki.
Cracked Egg Studios released private betas of CES NuWiki Special Pages to select NuWiki users on April 16, 2008, and May 13, 2008, who had donated to Cracked Egg Studios to continue developing features as add-ons to NuWiki. However, around May 24, 2008, the voices requesting that Cracked Egg Studios release a product that didn't have a defunct dependency won out.
Cracked Egg Studios further extended CES NuWiki Special Pages, rewriting and rebranding it as VaultWiki, a competing product to NuWiki. VaultWiki launched June 15, 2008 at crackedeggstudios.com.