Thread:AnnabellRice/@comment-10473115-20170215213808

tervehdys

I think it's better to have a more technical discussion about templates separately from the policy thread. I hope you don't mind that I'll link this discussion to that thread also for other possibly interested. I was very glad to see your comment about just showing a way to modify those because we are in a dire need of template editors. Nathan hasn't very active anymore and I'm not really a coder and have learned everything by just examining our existing templates (also proved to be inactive for long stretches) so any help would be great.

For template work it's important to know how to Purge pages. PurgeButton is a great tool for that. Everything can be undoed so don't be too afraid about breaking things but there's also page cache involved and changes will not happen immediately. That's why it's good to test bigger changes on a sandbox environment before going live with them. That can be done by copying an existing template to your user space and calling that like a template. If you want, I can create those pages for you to show what I mean.

And now to our existing Comic Appearance Templates. I updated the documentation of Template:A and Template:Mentioned. Those templates call different functions on Module:Appearances. As you can see, APN is only other function on the module. So most other appearance templates are just using A and just adding a different green text.

It should be quite easy to create a new function Minor to Appearances module by just duplicating existing ones. Then we have to create a Template:Minor based on existing templates and just change A to Minor on Template:Dream and others. 