Thread:Chaosian/@comment-30396463-20141109062930/@comment-1932315-20141116212935

I have- returned!

Yessir, templates are the little bit of hell-magic that makes Wikis run, but they're not too friendly - I pretty much just had to intuit them myself. They're pretty easy to make a page for, but difficult to make themselves. At a basic level, to make a template: The template should be created. To add the contents of Template:Robot to an article, you need to add a template marker to another page. This is done with either the green puzzle piece in the visual-editor, or, a pair of braces enclosing the template name in souce-editor (eample: ).
 * Click to add a new page.
 * When naming the page, start the name with "Template:" (example: Template:Robot), and Wikia will perform its Voodoo to make it a template.

As for making the contents of a template itself, you're pretty much on your own with that one... To be honest, I don't even know what languge the templates we have are in; JavaScript or something, I don't know, I can't write in it, I can only read and regurgitate it. I will say however that, to my knowledge, all of Wikia's content, templates included, appears to be under a creative Commons Liscence, meaning its totally legal to take the code of functioning templates from other wikis and put them in your own. It's easiest to find a template you like off another Wiki find the name by going into the source-editor - and then, with the name - finding the template through the search bar. You can try it on our Wiki by looking for something like "Template:Infobox" or "Template:Infobox Weapon". Remember that the template code you need is pretty much always in source mode, rarely the visual editor.

Some attribution may be needed, no clue, no one really seems to care. Keep in mind that if you're copying template code, red-links might start showing up and the template will be doing some weird stuff (probably with a lot of random braces all around the place). This means that the template you're using relies on another template to function, and you'll need the code for that one too. If I'm copying template code, I usually have 4 or 5 tabs open; 1 for editing and stiching together the main template on the Metro Wiki, 1 for tunneling down into the code and fixing red links on the wiki, 1 or more for getting the base template code from another wiki, and something from 1 to 6 for successive template codes to fix the red links on the Metro Wiki.

And that's the gist of it. If you need help, I'll try to stay in touch more often. Somehow the Metro Wiki stopped being my home page, I think I'll fix that right now.