The Vault

The Vault became one of the largest features of the Cracked Egg Studios Official Web Site on December 25, 2006, containing articles covering Cracked Egg Studios, its various productions, and anything remotely related. Articles could be written collaboratively by Cracked Egg Studios and volunteers, allowing many to be changed by anyone with close affiliation to the studio.

The Vault was one of the main sections of Ted Phillips's personal web site, Ted's Fun Site, in 1998. Although the web site itself and knowledge of most of its content has been lost, the site's visitors recall that The Vault contained basic historical information about Ted Phillips's artwork and several original comic strips, one of which being Mr. Ant and the Cheese.

As a tribute to this lost primitive site, one of the main features that launched with the Cracked Egg Studios Official Web Site on May 29, 2005 was The Vault. The plan was to include a list all of the previous endeavors of Cracked Egg Studios, providing links to detailed information and synopses of each one, sometimes even the production itself. The productions placed in The Vault would be those that were completed to the satisfaction of the studio, had been placed on hold, or had been abandoned.

Despite the plans for this feature, The Vault remained merely a list of productions pre-2005 without synopses or streaming content, because web site updates tended to focus mainly on the health of the CES Forum.

When the Noey Official Web Site launched in June 2005, it developed its own Vault section, called The Arsenal to avoid copyright infringement. When Noey Productions was assimilated by Cracked Egg Studios in 2006, The Arsenal was added to The Vault, allowing fans to purchase newer additions to the production list.

In November 2006, Cracked Egg Studios announced its plans to upgrade the official web site to Version 6.0 and finally update The Vault for the first time in 18 months. The project, referred to as Crackipedia, continued through the month of December until its launch on Christmas Eve. Version 2.0 created a behind-the-scenes bridge between Wiki software and the rest of the web site by using a package called vbWiki Pro from NuHiT. The Wiki software provided an interface to manage The Vault's content and making it more appealing for Staff to update it.

Site content was added as Article to The Vault, saving them in categories in what was called "the EGG encyclopedia."

The use of vbWiki Pro in The Vault inspired a series of site updates, including cross-domain cookie handling, an improved News section, and new BB-Codes for more dynamic content.

In April 2007, NuHiT contacted Cracked Egg Studios regarding newer software in development, called NuWiki. Although the proposal to replace The Vault was originally rejected, CES Staff initiated the upgrade by continuing the software's development parallel to its creator.

The Vault v3.0 was much faster than Version 2.0. Load times and server load were drastically reduced, and complete integration into the site was realized. Instead of a bridge, Version 3.0 used a direct modification of the existing site that was built using the vBulletin engine. As a result, The Vault's Usergroup Permissions were more flexible, and in addition to selections from popular Wikispeak, The Vault supported BB-Code in articles.

However, within a month, programmers at Cracked Egg Studios found that the NuWiki software was quite limited. They began developing their own wiki software and released it as a NuWiki addon on August 20, 2007. That fall, the developers at NuHit disappeared and the NuWiki software was abandoned, so Cracked Egg Studios took this opportunity to modify their wiki further for commercial release.

VaultWiki entered private beta in March 2008, and was released publicly for sale via the web site on June 15, 2008. Cracked Egg Studios has continued to develop and support VaultWiki as a product offering to this day.