Help:Templates
Contents
About
We use templates to control the layout of our pages.
Creating a template
Template names are prefixed with Template:, you create them like any other wiki page.
Using a template
Templates are wiki pages which can be used in other pages in three ways:
{{Name}}includes the content of the template at the moment the page containing it is fetched "[[Template:Name]]".{{subst:Name}}inserts the content of the template into the code of the page in a form that is editable normally "[[Template:Name]]" after you have saved your text.{{msgnw:Name}}when the page containing it is fetched, includes the template in a form that displays it as raw wiki syntax, like<nowiki>does
Control template inclusion
You can control template inclusion by the use of <noinclude> and
<includeonly> tags.
Anything between <noinclude> and </noinclude> will be processed and
displayed only when the page is being viewed directly, not included.
Possible applications are:
- Categorising templates
- Interlanguage links to similar templates in other languages
- Explanatory text about how to use the template
The converse is <includeonly>. Text between <includeonly> and
</includeonly> will be processed and displayed only when the page is
being included. The obvious application is to add all pages containing a given template to a category.
Note that the usual update problems apply -- if you change the categories inside a template, the categories of the referring pages won't be updated until those pages are edited.
Transcluding a page that isn't a template
You can also transclude a non-template page by putting using {{Namespace:Page title}}. The main namespace is the default, so using :Page title will include a regular article. This kind of transclusion is used to make the "On one page" tabs on our gene pages.
