Help:Templates

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.

List of Table Templates in EcoliWiki

See Category:Table_templates