Mediawiki wrote:
is there a way to store general information in a template and access parts of that information by a conditional call of the template?
You can do this if you put a long list of #if statements in another template and nest them accordingly.
For example if you have template DepartmentHeads, you could have
{{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Dept X | Smith }} {{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Dept Y | Jones }} {{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Dept Z | Davis }} etc.
Template PhoneNumbers could have
{{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Smith | (888) 555-1234 }} {{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Jones | (888) 555-4321 }} {{ #ifeq: {{{1}}} | Davis | (888) 555-1221 }} etc.
Then just include that in the outer template:
The head of {{{dept}}} is {{ DepartmentHeads|{{{dept}}} }} They can be contacted at {{ PhoneNumbers|{{ DepartmentHeads|{{{dept}}} }} }}
This is a tedious way to create templates as a quasi-database, but if the data is small in quantity and fairly static over time, it works and avoids building an extension.
Mike