Issue: Template use in non-wiki forums

While I do agree with you that templates could be useful outside of wiki articles, I don't know if it's wise to implement it.

This is not something that is currently possible because the wiki parser is a completely different class. Templates have to be parsed in a different order. Using the wiki parser in non-wiki posts or implementing some sort of workaround would be a huge detriment to overall forum performance.

Just to be clear in my own mind... When the article is posted/edited the wiki bb codes are just stored in the clear. When the article is displayed, those bb codes are passed to whatever processing was defined for the bb code. I presume that is the extent of the processing that vBulletin performs on these.

Therefore, if TEMPLATE is seen, the TEMPLATE widget is invoked. That widget makes the {param} into a link to the template article. I take it that there is no way to have the replacement code processor actually look up the contents. The reason I am confused, is that the AJAX processing apparently does just this and displays the results in a pop up.

All BB-Codes are stored in the same way. However, the Template code (along with a select number of other exceptions) are parsed separately when used in a wiki article. While doing it in only a single post (the article) is negligible, doing something like this for entire threads could have a serious impact on performance.

The AJAX previews parse the template correctly because an AJAX call to the article is made (if the user hovers) - since the article uses a different parser, it is displayed with templates replaced.

vBulletin's parser is not easily extendable - it doesn't let us define our own class ahead of time - so anything along these lines, outside of a wiki article, would be highly inefficient.