Thread:Avagothen/@comment-1682014-20130621131427/@comment-1682014-20130712132739

At the very basic, templates are just like pages, but you can add variables which will be set when the template is declared. There aren't really any functions to speak of.

However, wikia comes with special expressions that you can use which can be used to parse variables and stuff to change how the template behaves. This is how I made the template automatically turn table cells green if they are different from the previous one. There is a guide on Wikipedia for these, which conveniently works here as well.

The problem is, the template becomes rather unreadable once you begin to stuff it with more complex functions.