Miraheze Developers Wiki/scn

So what are templates?
A template is a page that gets transcluded in another page. This is useful for text that is used in multiple places, only the template needs editing to change all instances where it appears.

All templates are in the "templates namespace".

For example, create a page called Template:Main with the text

and then inserting the template where you want the text to appear gives:

The main article for this is Random page.

About this wiki
This wiki is intended to be a central repository for Miraheze templates.

Templates are a headache to disentangle, understand, install and maintain. Miraheze already makes life considerably easier for wiki admins, allowing them to focus on adding content instead of diverting time and energy to keeping up with the upgrade-debug race.

For full functionality MediaWiki ought to ship with templates bundled in but there is no sign of this happening any time soon. Miraheze wiki admins either write their own templates or export them from elsewhere e.g. Wikipedia.org. This is a wasteful dispersion of effort in place of collaboration.

Use the community portal for any meta discussions (about the wiki) or anything relevant to its intended purpose.

How to use this wiki
Using templates from this wiki won't prevent you from having unique templates on your wiki. The advantage of using templates from this wiki is that multiple people will have already put in the effort to make highly complex templates suitable for general use. Writing your own templates.
 * Porting templates versus interwiki transcluding templates, most templates here are imported, currently interwiki transcluding doesn't function.
 * Customising templates, tidying up imported templates.
 * For editing many wiki pages consecutively use (carefully) AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) or Javascript Wiki Browser (JWB).

Icons
Miraheze wikis are Instant Commons enabled, otherwise the images for icons would have to be uploaded locally. A good source for these is Wikimedia Commons' Category:Icons by subject.

Template testing
For previewing a template do the following:
 * 1) Copy the templates to be tested under a common prefix. For example, you might copy   to  . Alternatively, you might create   as a redirect to.
 * 2) Go to Special:TemplateSandbox. Fill in the page or revision to be rendered, and the prefix you chose in step 1. It is possible to specify multiple prefixes by separating them using vertical bars, e.g..
 * 3) Click View.

There is also a box at the bottom of the edit form which allows for previewing some other page as it would appear were the template being edited saved with the current contents of the edit form.

Available templates

 * Category:Templates