> 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.
It's a performance issue. With the number of hits that Wikipedia and
other Wikimedia wikis get, it's a significant hit. Nested
transclusion, for our purposes, shouldn't be an issue.
Also, Wikipedia *does* use nested transclusion, fairly frequently.
The [[WP:AMB]] project (Article Message Boxes) defines a meta-template
{{ambox}}, and many templates, such as {{expand}} transclude that
template. It's performing the exact same task as we want to use here
- making the templates have a similar look/feel, making the creation
of new templates with the same look/feel easy, and changing that
look/feel at a later date, if desired, almost trivial.
Timothy