2009/4/7 Håkon Wium Lie <howcome(a)opera.com>om>:
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.