User blog:Light and Bright/Starter Guide to Templates

Hey all, just thought I'd introduce some templates basics to you guys, as they are becoming more and more prominent features on this wiki and others.

Templates are often used to replicate commonly used forms of content, and to style article pages to suit the wiki's needs and themes.

There are multiple types of templates that one can make, them being:

Infoboxes are templates that are usually on the side of article pages; they shortlist the important information covered in the entire article. It is a good alternative to scrolling through pages and pages of information.
 * Infoboxes (Learn More)

Infobox Album (There are different mainstream wikia templates for infoboxes) Example

Often times, famous quotes regarding the subject are at the top [or bottom] of articles. They may also be placed at the top of certain headings, to make each section stand out more.
 * Quotes (Learn More)

Main Wikia Template Example

Navboxes, more formally known as navigation boxes, help users—especially new ones— navigate from one article to the next. This is especially helpful when one wants to see all pages of a similar type.
 * Navbox (Learn More)

Main Wikia Template Example

Notices are placed on article pages to show the status of the page. For example, if a page is under review, or is a stub, this type of template can be placed at the top.
 * Notice (Learn More)

Main Wikia Template Example

These templates link to other articles which relate to the same subject. Some keywords used in these templates include "See also" and "You may."
 * Context-link (Learn More)

Example

Infoicon templates create small icons that go with certain text phrases on wikia.
 * Infoicon (Learn More)

Example

Scroll boxes are meant to contain a large amount of text in a small space. They do so by allowing users to scroll through the text box.
 * Scrollbox (Learn More)

Example

When creating an article, one often refers to certain important media or sites in order to generate good content. These citations, marked by the tags, can be organized into a list of references, done by this type of template.
 * Citation or Reference (Learn More)

Main Information Page Example

Images and videos can be organized into galleries, slideshows, and sliders via this type of template.
 * Image, video, or gallery (Learn More)

Example

Lots of numbers need a lot of analysis. One way to make this easier is to use data templates. These are often made in the form of tables and charts.
 * Data (Learn More)

Example

Being the most widely known template type, design templates play a huge role in user navigation through the wiki. Often times, these are the templates that go on the front pages of wikis, and profiles, etc. They are most often found on Fanon wikis (like this one) rather than factual wikis (like the mainstream KotLC one). These are the templates I expect to be most popular in terms of orders.
 * Design (Learn More)

Example

Navigation templates are actually an over-arching branch of templates, encompassing the navboxes as well as the context-link templates.
 * Navigation (Learn More)

All templates that do not appear on article pages are in this category. They often appear on message walls, profiles, and file descriptions.
 * Non-article (Learn More)

Example

All templates not marked as any of the above types are in the "Unknown" category.
 * Unknown

Please note that these are simplified descriptions of the various template types, and the official source for this is Help:Template Types.