luxurywiki with and without arcane engine - exactly the difference

**osirisjem** · 11-22-2006, 04:36 PM

is it possible to show people exactly what arcane engine does for luxurywiki by showing luxurywiki with and without it ?

maybe luxurywiki.com and noarcane.luxurywiki.com ?

i realize that the arcaneless version will be ugly and not work as well, but it might hightlight the usefulness of arcane engine to the "newbie" site admins.

just a thought.

**ElfMage** · 11-22-2006, 05:24 PM

That's a good question.

Arcane Engine provides the templating system used by the site and all installed packages, this allows the whole site, regardless of how many packages are installed to retain a seamless and monolithic look and feel.

One of the main features of AE is that it provides a 'master category catalog' with the required inter-package location synchronization(vbulletin, wiki, photopost, downloads, etc). For instance you can go to a page in vbulletin and AE detects where you are and the corresponding categories in all the other systems.

Arcane Engine also provides 'auto-content' retrieved automatically from sources like google, yahoo, flickr, youtube, etc. (this content retrieval is done behind the scenes in the server, to improve the user's experience).

If you were to remove Arcane Engine from luxurywiki.com, you would lose the following (amongst many other features):
* Home Page:
- the 'Car Selector' (which is generated from the master category catalog),
- the 'Lastest xxxx' (which are blocks (modules, if you would) from Arcane Engine, hosted by the home page)
- the stats block, which is another block.
* Most of content shown on the 'portals' for each make or model are also generated by Arcane Engine. Which uses the datastore from each of the installed packages (vbulletin, photopost, etc) as sources of data to be weaved any way you like.
- For instance, in the Photos section, AE is showing photos from Photopost, as well as from flicker. In the Links section, it is showing links retrieved from auto-content, as well as links submitted by users of luxurywiki.com

And so on.

Due to this, it is not quite possible for luxurywiki.com to function without the Arcane Engine.

I can show you luxurywiki.com with its original (developer's) skin. Since the engine is skinnable, it is easy to change the skin on the fly on a per session / preferences basis.

Notice that Arcane Engine doesn't do 'integrated authentication', this is handled elsewhere (e.g. vbWiki).

For instance www.arcanetek.com has vbulletin, mediawiki and downloads II (ecDownloads). It is using vbWiki for login integration, but it doesn't have Arcane Engine running.

Once we are further in the development of Arcane Engine, we'll post more detailed (and clearer) documentation.