Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-26408702-20150811115253/@comment-24930713-20150812044018

Templates are basically repeatable mini pieces of code that, when used on a page of your choosing, add style and structure without cluttering up your page. You can either make them yourself or copy them from other wikis. If you decide to copy them, be aware that some users may have way more experience than you; meaning they may have added CSS or JS, that gives them more control on how their template functions, that you would also need to copy. It's also common courtesy to at least state in the template's code where you copied it from. Adding comments in the template looks like this: As for your homepage, I'll focus on the "Main Slider." In it, your friend uses another template called "Main Box" as a container for any info you want to add. In "Main Box," they have already added styling to it, as well as made it so that it allows two inputs. In the "Main Slider" those inputs are "PAGENAME" and the basic slider that links to specific pages. For whatever reason, they didn't use a template to hold the welcome message, but that is a minor example of what the code for the homepage would look like without it inside a template. Now imagine several more boxes written outside the template like your welcome message, and you can imagine how cluttered it can look. For that character's page, your friend used a different template called "Character Box." If you click the edit button, you can see what inputs the template takes. So when you use it on another page, it should look something like this: That being said, if you leave out a part like: |Birthday then the birthday won't show on the infobox. Also mind your capitalization, you have two "name"s in that template, one for the title of the infobox, and the other for the name slot below the image. But all your other input options are capitalized, so if you go to a page and add the template using lowercase, it won't show up properly.

Edit: Hopefully this explained it well enough, sorry it looks like a wall of text. :(