User:Followed by 100 zeroes/Templates 101

Yes, I am quite positive that some of you out there are very, very experienced in working with wikimarkup. I'm not surprised either&mdash;wikimarkup is a very basic, useful, and downright easy when compared to (X)HTML.

However, although wikimarkup is quite easy and takes only a few keystrokes, it can become a pain when you're making a navigation box: copy, paste. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. Then you realize that you want to change the color of the box title. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. As you can see, this grows quite tedious. What you need is a template.

Starting up
Okay, first, you've got a box that you want to insert in 2, 20, or 200 pages and it's too much trouble to go through them all. Now gather all the code for that box and stick it into a wiki-page called "Template:Navigation" or "Template:BrickNav" or "Template:Whatever."

Now just go to any page which needs that template and write or  or. Save. You're done. It's that simple.

If you try changing the source template, you'll notice that all the pages that have it also follow suit. That's the power of templates for 'ya.

Inputs
Okay, suppose we had a "Hello My Name Is" template that looks like this:

Substituting a template
Now suppose you were from the old days where this automatic welcoming tool wasn't around. Back then, you had to get the code from Template:Welcome and shove it in to the page with&mdash;surprise, surprise&mdash;the code.