Hello, all.
I have a question about templates. I understand that they are excellent for building things that one might wish to repeat on many pages, so having the template saves a lot of extra work. Not only that, if you need to update the content, you need only update the template, and the changes show up everywhere. That part I get, but here is what I'm wondering:
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."
I have this in mind because there will be a lot of pages that we want to look exactly alike, save for the actual content. How could I set this up so that they use the template to start a new page from scratch?
Hmm...lots of questions in this one. Thank you in advance for your assistance in clarifying my understanding of templates.
Craig Hartel http://codex.wordpress.org/
Technically speaking, you could do it. However, it would be awkward.
In FIRSTwiki (www.firstwiki.org), each of the teams have a page (eg, [[FIRSTwiki:1]][[FIRSTwiki:1238]] [[FIRSTwiki:1227]]). Most of the pages are the same, but a few early ones don't. We could use a template to handle this, but it would be difficult to manage and edit. (I suggested using one for the table, since that is a better canidate).
So, basically, yes you could, but you may not want to.
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:22:06 -0700, Craig Hartel craig@nuclearmoose.com wrote:
Hello, all.
I have a question about templates. I understand that they are excellent for building things that one might wish to repeat on many pages, so having the template saves a lot of extra work. Not only that, if you need to update the content, you need only update the template, and the changes show up everywhere. That part I get, but here is what I'm wondering:
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."
I have this in mind because there will be a lot of pages that we want to look exactly alike, save for the actual content. How could I set this up so that they use the template to start a new page from scratch?
Hmm...lots of questions in this one. Thank you in advance for your assistance in clarifying my understanding of templates.
Craig Hartel http://codex.wordpress.org/
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:22:06 -0700, Craig Hartel craig@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.
Thanks for your replies; it's much appreciated!
Craig.
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org