Template talk:Album page machine

Some tips

I posted this in our discord right after I made this, but thought it would be helpful to leave behind here. For the wikipedia help page about substitution, see here.

The key part of this template is the "substitution" thing I've recently learned about with templates 
this is going to get a bit technical
If you add subst: in front of any template when you're adding it, it doesn't just temporarily transclude the template code to the page - it like copies and pastes and leaves behind the text that the template would have temporarily transcluded
Like for example, the "possessive name" template gives you an apostrophe and an s after a name. If you type {{PN|Rivers Cuomo}} you get [[Rivers Cuomo|Rivers Cuomo's]] 
But when you go back to edit this hypothetical page, you still see {{PN|Rivers Cuomo}} - it is just "transcluding" the text [[Rivers Cuomo|Rivers Cuomo's]], not leaving it behind on the page permanently. But when you go back to edit this hypothetical page, you still see *{{PN|Rivers Cuomo}}* - it is just "transcluding" the text [[Rivers Cuomo|Rivers Cuomo's]], not leaving it behind on the page permanently. If someone else went and edited the possessive name template after we'd made this hypothetical page, it would alter how our previous edits would appear.
When you do {{subst:PN|Rivers Cuomo}}, you instead get [[Rivers Cuomo|Rivers Cuomo's]] dumped onto the page for good.
If that doesn't make sense lord help me I can't explain it any better
Anyway - if you use substitution (subst:) in front of that album page machine, you get the text of an album page as per usual, permanently on the page. no longer in template form. We obviously wouldn't want to have album pages all formatted as templates - it would make them too hard to edit for lesser experienced editors 
Obviously there are going to be album pages that necessitate less cookie-cutter formatting, too. So you can use substitution here to just start the page, then go back and fill in the rest (i.e. sections for "Recording," "Reception," etc. You actually have to make a few clean up edits after doing it - it displays all 20 tracks in the track listing even if you leave those fields blank, for example

--MyNameIsJason (talk) 07:47, 12 June 2022 (UTC)