Using templates for workgroup Wiki pages | Project management | Forum

Driven mad by 49 C (111 F) heat, I have taken a second stab at using templates in our Wiki, to somewhat greater success this time.

Check out the page Template:CLLARE_Workgroup.  This is a template for the main page of a CLLARE workgroup.  The template is given a single argument (the workgroup name) and from that it puts together a nice looking page of boxes which includes the contents of the pages "{ARGUMENT} Workgroup Purpose" and "{ARGUMENT} Workgroup Main Tasks", and includes a link to the page "{ARGUMENT} Workgroup suggested reading".

You look at the NGW main page for an example of this template in use.  The code for that page (which you can see just by editing it) is now nothing but "{{CLLARE Workgroup|Navigation and Guidance}}".  All the actual content has been pulled in from this article and this article.

The advantage of using this approach to do all of our workgroup main pages is that they will look perfectly consistent.  We can change the CLLARE Workgroup template at any stage in the future (to make it more informative or prettier) and all the workgroup pages will automatically change to reflect it.

NGW is the only workgroup I've changed to work this way so far.  Eventually it would be good if they all worked this way (in fact, the idea makes no sense if they don't all do it), but I'm not sure when we are migrating Wiki content or how so I'm holding off for now.

Workgroups probably aren't the only place we can use templates like this to increase consistency and reduce work.  If people could make some effort to understand how the templating works and use them where they think it makes sense, our Wiki will probably turn out being more awesome than it otherwise would.  Thanks!

You create new templates just like you would create new pages, just make sure you start the page name with "Template:".  E.g. if you wanted to create a template for, say, vehicles, you could make a page called "Template:Vehicle".  Then you could create a page with the title "CLLARE Command Module" and make the code for that page "{{Vehicle|arg1|arg2|…|argn}}".  Then CLLARE Command Module would look just like the vehicle template but with all the template's occurences of {{{1}}} replaced by "arg1", etc.  You can pass named parameters, too, check out this page for examples.