Introduction to Curator Engine

What Curator Engine is, what it is not, and how the engine and marketplace fit together.

Curator Engine is the self-hosted core behind the Curator ecosystem. It is built for teams that want control over publishing, extension delivery, and marketplace workflows without handing the whole stack to a hosted vendor.

What Curator Engine actually is

Curator Engine is a PHP application packaged for self-hosted deployment. It ships with an installer, a structured schema, and an admin surface that can be extended over time through marketplace themes and plugins.

Unlike the earlier mock copy, this is not a JavaScript SDK, a hosted SaaS dashboard, or a GraphQL framework. The engine is a traditional server-rendered application designed to be installed on infrastructure you control.

What you can do with it today

• Package and install the core from a release zip
• Configure a MySQL-compatible database during install
• Run a curated admin and public experience from your own host
• Extend the surrounding ecosystem with marketplace listings, releases, and support metadata

How the ecosystem fits together

The core engine is the product you deploy. Curator Marketplace is the public distribution layer for themes, plugins, releases, and supporting docs. The two are related, but they are not the same thing.

That distinction matters in the docs because it keeps the promises honest: the engine powers your installation, while the marketplace helps distribute compatible add-ons around it.

Before you install

Plan for a normal PHP hosting environment with:

• PHP 8.1 or newer
• A MySQL or MariaDB database
• Write access to the project's storage/ directory
• Access to run php install/install.php during setup

If that matches your environment, the installation page is the right next step.