Christian Punk Initiative:Why Templates

So you wonder why this wiki uses templates? Well, there are several reasons why. Allow me to quicly list some of the reasons, then go into details at a later time:
 * Uniformity
 * Ease of management
 * Enhanced functionality
 * Simplified editing

Uniformity
An advantage of using a template is that you can have a section or an entire page have the exact same design across all the pages that use this template. All the formatting happens in the template without requiring the user to do anything, other than adding the missing info.

Ease of Management
Because the template takes care of formatting and other design-related things, it means that if an admin decides that, for example, all the contact info should be in bold text, the admin only has to adjust the template, and all pages that use the template will see that text in a bold font. The alternative would be to edit each and every page, make the text bold, save the page, open the next page, make the text bold, etc. Not only would that be a lot of work for whoever will be tasked with that job, but also will it invite mistakes which may or may not go undetected for some time or could even lead to breakage of the wiki. Using a template avoids these problems and will let admins make quick changes to all the pages by simply adjusting a single template.

Enhanced Functionality
Using templates lets us do stuff which normally would not be so easy to achieve, like using conditional text (if field so-and-so is left blank, display such-and-such text, use placeholder images, etc.) and it lets us automatically add pages to the correct categories, even if it is a category about certain missing info!

Simplified Editing
Finally, there is you, the end user. We know that using templates can be confusing, and can even seem complicated but believe me when I tell you that if we didn't use templates, it would be much harder for you to make the page look the way we want you to.

Let's, as an example, have look at the discography template. The part that a user (that's you) is supposed to copy, is this:

You'd enter the album title, the year and optionally the name of previously uploaded album art (without the "File:" part!), you save the page and that's it. will become the band name so you should never change that line. But behind the scenes of the template, this is going on: : -- (category:_albums) Perhaps I should simplify that: : {album_title} ({year})

Here's what it does. You, the user, has copied the bit which should be pasted into the band page, entered some info and now the backend as it is called, will use that text to fill in stuff.

We start the line with a colon, this will cause the text to indent because that looks nice.

Next, we check to see if album art was provided and if not, we display a placeholder image and, in the same instant, add the page to the category called "Discography entries without album art". If there is album art, then we use that and we do not add the page to any additional categories.

On the next line, we create the link to the album page, whether it already exists or not. The album page will be named "Band-AlbumTitle-Year", so for example "The Crucified-The Pillars of Humanity-1991", but we also make sure that on the band page, the link will be shown as just the album title, or it will start looking really messy.

Finally, we will show the release year in round brackets on that line and link to the category which holds all the albums from that release year.

In recap, without a template, we would want you to add: : The Pillars of Humanity (1991) Yeah, I know, that is a lot to take in, and a lot to remember! So that is why we use templates, it makes your life and ours easier!