On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 09:33:51AM -0700, David Artman wrote: > Now, if it's possible to "nest templates" so that the con-specific > template instantiates the base template on-the-fly and populates the > placeholder text (and table cell colors and anything else we'd tweak on > a per-badge basis) each time the con-specific template is called, then > that would certainly be more structured and easier to modify later > (well, except for the specifically-sized icons). One need only change, > say, the dimensions of the base template and all specific templates > which call it would automatically also change, because they always > "re-generate" themselves by looking first at that base code. (Right?) This is actually a large portion of where I got bogged down. There's a long discussion at WikiMedia Commons which suggests as a best practice *not* nesting templates as doing so leads to problems. I'm not sure if it was for reasons of server efficiency or because they felt in the long run it made maintainence even more headachey, but it was very specifically suggested that the usual practice be to copy the base template into the newly designed template and then edit it. That said, I feel as the rest of you that it would be vastly preferable not to do so for exactly the reasons everybody is discussing. I think I started a foray into attempting to figure out how to get that work. There may be some shreds of it lying around, some of which could be useful to somebody wishing to pick up the ball. > > Of course, I may be really misunderstanding the current state of > > things and the "suggestion" that I'm making has already been discussed > > or even implemented. If that's the case, I'm very sorry. Considered, not yet implemented. I no longer recall if there was some implementation-specific reason (perhaps a "feature" of MediaWiki) which got in the way, or if it was just my hesitation to venture too far afield from the way Wikipedia does it too quickly, on the assumption that they had clever people designing these things.
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