Bulbapedia:Templates

Reference page for template creation.

• General template help: [1]
• Magic words: Help and Manual
• Parser functions: Help, Manual, and list.
• And of course, look at existing templates with the features you want. That's probably easiest, and the best starting location since they're more likely to conform to style guidelines.

Testing templates

While making a new template or a new revision of an existing template, it is often better to put it in a user subpage (make an article at User:<yourname>/<pagename>) until it is ready and approved. If creating a test page in your userspace, mind Bulbapedia:userspace policy.

To test your subpage template creation with actual use, you can post it at Bulbapedia:Sandbox, just by adding {{User:<yourname>/<pagename>|test parameters}} to the page. This will transclude your page as if it was a template, despite not being in the template namespace.

If a template was recently updated, but pages which use it do not update to reflect the change, the specific pages can be forced to update their transcluded pages by performing "null edits" - clicking the "Edit this page" button and saving without making any changes. If this does not update the use of the template on the page, there is probably a bug in the template, and more null edits should not be performed.