I figured we should start a page somewhere that we could all discuss templates rather than trying to carry on a conversation over multiple users' talk pages. So far I know the following people have been discussing templates: Pteague, Wagnike2, Metalbaswee, Ariyen, and The Valader and I'll be contacting them about this post - others are welcome to join the conversation. I also started a STO Templates category to make it easier to see what templates had been added specifically for game content.
I'm not happy with the Template:Weapon I put together for Metalbaswee, but it seems to work for now.
The Template:Starship works great for the player ships, but I ran into issues trying to use it for the D7 Battlecruiser and D'deridex Battleship pages as they're NPC ships... Some of the details can be guessed from the memory-alpha site, but Star Trek cannon and game stats don't always match very well. I also put together some subclassed templates to make management of the Starfleet ships easier (i.e. the Rapier, Saber, and Ushaan are various skins for the Starfleet Light Cruiser and as such all have the same stats). Klingon ships don't have this problem as the B'rel Bird-of-Prey is the only skin for the 1st tier Bird-of-Prey and it's similar for every other level and type of Klingon ship. Any other faction ships they come out with later we'll have to deal with when they show up.
The Engineering Bridge Officer, Science Bridge Officer, and Tactical Bridge Officer have all of their skills linked to different pages. At first I thought this may be annoyingly hectic (and it may be), but all of the Kit "powers" are the same as the Bridge Officer ground skills (I'm still not sure how to deal with the space skills). Rather than duplicating each skill power on all of the various kit pages I ended up putting templates together and putting them into the Skill Effects category. I also then set up a page to refer and display all of the levels of the skill, but as they're not all filled in it's very lacking (see Vascular Regenerator). These then make it much easier to make the Science Kit - Medic Mk IV type pages. I still think the kit pages need a template, but I'm still not yet sure how to put these together.
I'd like to add some CSS to put some color into some of the templates (like the blue on the item descriptions in-game), but I'm not sure what to label these classes... And I don't intend to label them "blue".
Ariyen stated she had an idea for NPC templates.
The Valader has been adding some maintenance templates.
--Pteague 20:00, February 17, 2010 (UTC)
I think that for the ship template, it could be applicable for NPC ships, as its a ship template, but then in the Template itself it should be added something like "Playable: No" inside the infobox, so that readers know then which ship is playable and which ones are not.
I'm still working on those user templates, Userbox have some technical major problems in new wikis as I have seen and I will have to do the User templates another way, more simple. (talk) VofValar 19:21, April 9, 2010 (UTC)
I have started adding user templates and put them all in the User templates Category, they look pretty good if you don't put them together, this will do for user wishes of showing which faction they want to be or are. (talk) VofValar 19:21, April 9, 2010 (UTC)
I added a new template for ground weapons that is meant to replace the two currently existing templates: Template:GroundWeaponsInfobox, and Template:Weapon. It contains all the information in used in the existing templates and adds some more fields. It also replicates the look of the in-game item popup description.
If I don't burn myself out I intend to create new templates for equipment, devices, and kits as well as their space-based equivalents as time allows. Any suggestions or ideas are more than welcome! ThatFreakBob 20:26, March 9, 2010 (UTC)
For the Admins I have created a template for Sysop userpages, there are two kind of templates: Klingon admin templates and Federation admin templates, all sysops feel free to test. (talk) VofValar 19:21, April 9, 2010 (UTC)