Teflpedia talk:Teachers' room

Gift box
Hi Bob. I've been studying MediaWiki templates and template parameters over at my place. I noticed your greeting box there at top of the Teflpedia:Teachers' room and thought you might like to see how a MediaWiki template could do that and, being a template with its title and text provided in '|' separated parameters, could easily be reused on other pages with different title and text in it. Voila, template:box, filled with the same title and text as your greeting box:

Maybe you already know all this? Cheers! --Roger 00:38, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. No I don't already know any of this. My templating is usually made up of copying other examples and trying to make them work. :-) Looking at how that works it's pretty cool. The template "box" has the parameters - so it would be possible to change the colour scheme of all the templates just by changing "box"
 * But now that I think about is some more - doesn't it mean that every template on every page would have to be a a few lines of text rather than just the name of the template? --Bob M 08:15, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Depends what you are trying to do. Yes, everywhere you use . But how many places _do_ you use the  template? If in only _one_ place, you don't need it in a separate template page anyway, simply put all the wiki markup for it directly in the one place you want it, or use [Template:Box]] as above to move the reusable part, the box look, into a reusable place. If your answer were, I want to use this message verbatim on many pages, then a designated template for that message _is_ quite handy, as you noted. But that designated message's template page could still be a nested call to Template:Box! For example, if we did have instances of Template:Teachers on multiple pages, (we don't I think) then Template:Teachers might usefully contain this wiki text (a nested Template:Box):


 * That way the look of the box could be reused elsewhere, and uniformly updated automatically when you tweaked it. However, this particular message of greeting to the Teflpedia:Teachers' room is not relevant elsewhere. So in this case a nested template is of no utility in and I recommend simply using Template:Box with the title, emoticons and message you desire directly where you desire it. --Roger 19:19, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's very true.--Bob M 15:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Archive
Let's archive the Teachers' room annually (2004, 2005 ... 2010, 2011)! Shall we? Start the new year fresh! The page is too long. Annual archives would give the site some History. That would look Good! I'm gonna do it if no one objects! Please comment... --Roger 14:12, 9 February 2012 (CST)
 * Sounds cool.--Bob M 09:02, 10 February 2012 (CST)