Building pages with Templates

If you are building a set of pages all with the same structure but different specific content, templates will speed up your work. A template is a file with bare-bones page structure, with basic layout ready to be modified. For instance, the template for these tutorial pages is a file with this content:

 @@title Tutorial: topic
 @@index topic
 .nav WikiWriter Tutorial: ((tutor01|Prev)) | ((tutor00|Up)) | (( tutor03|Next))
 .end

 == topic title

 .nav WikiWriter Tutorial: ((tutor01|Prev)) | ((tutor00|Up)) | ((tutor03|Next))
 .end

To use a template, first create the new page with a link on the Table of Contents. Then follow the link to the new page, and select Edit Page on the menu. Delete the "New page" text, and select Edit > Insert Template. Find and select the template you want in the File Request dialog, click on Open, and the template text pops up in the editor. The inserted text will replace any text you have selected on the page. If there is no text selected, the insertion will appear at the cursor position on the page.

Now you have the structure for the page, including the little pieces you might otherwise forget. Make the changes to tailor the page — title, index keywords, page names — and fill in the content.

To create a template, create a new project file and build the template as a WikiWriter page. Use File > SaveAs to save the file with a .tpl extension. For complex page structures, you would build a set of templates to insert preformatted sections as-needed, on a "mix and match" basis, for contracts, work orders, engineering specificatins and the like.