2009/4/7 HÃ¥kon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com:
Also, I don't really know how the internal systems work, and the braces in the template code scare me.
They scare everyone. The ParserFunctions syntax is evil. (This turns out to be a feature, as only those geeky enough to wrangle with it do so, giving the users a reasonably simple interface to use the templates themselves.) You could probably write Emacs in it. Someone probably has.
And what do you mean by "space messages"?
Sorry, I mean as in page namespaces - there's article space (e.g. [[Opera (software)]]), there's user space (e.g. [[User:David Gerard]]), there's project space (e.g. [[Wikipedia:WTF]]), there's a few others ... each has a Talk: space associated with it for discussion.
One of them is MediaWiki: space, which is where a lot of the interface is set. This is very easy to customise, as any administrator on a wiki can change it. See the sidebar on English Wikipedia? Its contents are set at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki%3ASidebar .
You should set up a MediaWiki installation and play with it, it's very easy to get started with :-)
- d.