Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-24207476-20140415133906/@comment-168424-20140417174524

Something I'm planning to add to Help:Templates. You get a sneak peek here...

Copying templates from other wikis
Contributors throughout Wikia have made all different kinds of templates. It is often better, faster, and safer to copy an existing template and modify it for your needs, rather than creating one from scratch. The Templates wiki is a good place to start for looking for a template that fits your needs. In most cases, you are free to copy templates based on the shared CC-by-SA license, but make sure the wiki you want to copy from does not have an alternat licensing scheme, since some Wikia wikis do, that may place restrictions on what you can copy.

Here are some basic steps to copy most templates:
 * 1) Find the template you want to copy (usually http://wikisubdomain.wikia.com/wiki/Template:templatename).
 * 2) Click the Edit button.
 * 3) Make sure you switch to Source Mode, so you can see the Wikitext code.
 * 4) Select all (Apple-A on the Mac or Ctrl-A on Windows) the wikitext and Copy (Apple-C on the Mac or Ctrl-C on Windows).
 * 5) Create a new template page on your wiki (http://yourwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Template:templatename?action=edit).
 * 6) Make sure you switch to Source Mode.
 * 7) Paste (Apple-V on the Mac or Ctrl-V on Windows) the wikitext code you copied and press the Publish button.

Many templates have a separate subpage for documentation about the template. Fortunately, the location is extremely standardized, so it is easy to copy the documentation as well. If you notice the template page you copied above does not look like the original, it is likely the documentation is on a separate subpage.

Copy template documentation:
 * 1) Find the template documentation you want to copy (usually http://wikisubdomain.wikia.com/wiki/Template:templatename/doc).
 * 2) Click the Edit button.
 * 3) Make sure you switch to Source Mode, so you can see the Wikitext code.
 * 4) Select all (Apple-A on the Mac or Ctrl-A on Windows) the wikitext and Copy (Apple-C on the Mac or Ctrl-C on Windows).
 * 5) Create a new template doc subpage page on your wiki (http://</tt>yourwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Template:</tt>templatename/doc?action=edit</tt>).
 * 6) Make sure you switch to Source Mode.
 * 7) Paste (Apple-V on the Mac or Ctrl-V on Windows) the wikitext code you copied and press the Publish button.