[Mediawiki-l] Templates - not understanding a concept

Wed Sep 15 13:08:25 UTC 2004

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:22:06 -0700, Craig Hartel <craig at nuclearmoose.com> wrote:
> Hello, all.
> If I had a page structure that I wanted people to use, would that be
> appropriately done with a template? For example, if I had a few sections, like
> "Description", "Requirements", "Download" etc., would it make sense to build a
> template with those pre-built as section headings? Could I then create custom
> stubs and include them in the template? The custom stub would be like "Add the
> product description here, blah, blah, blah."

This is essentially a different kind of template, I think. Several
people have requested the ability to use such templates, but they are,
in a sense, backwards to what is currently available: they call for an
outline of a page, which can be filled and modified on an individual
basis, but acts as a guideline.

The closest you could currently get would be a template containing the
headers, with each paragraph forming a parameter. However, you
wouldn't then be able to deviate from the template when you wanted to,
which would be annoying. The upside is you could rearrange the headers
in the template, and it would change the order in all the pages using
it.

However, there is no "default parameter" system as yet, so your "add a
such-and-such here" texts wouldn't be possible. Your users would also
have to add in the {{foo | para1=this ... }} manually, so they might
as well just type the headings themselves! The best you can do with
the current version of MediaWiki would seem to be have an example page
somewhere, and tell them to copy and paste it into their new article.
Then you can have the headings, dummy paragraphs, and everything, and
they don't even need to understand the markup.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]