Transclusion template for Archival pages?

[BAMaustin]

We maintain a MediaWiki space to support an Open Source program. Targeted support MediaWiki subsections are linked from the Help buttons within the program.

Every time we rollover to a new software release, the features & interfaces change. We can't retroactively modify the links in the program ... so we rollover to new editions of the user manual pages & freeze the superseded pages. 

The big problem is that the Categories & Google search results withe superseded pages badly obscure our current content pages. (Worse, we have translated versions of each page in a multitude of languages. That can multiply the clutter.)

So I'd like to add a transclusion template that suppresses the indexing (probably using nocat & noindex magic words) but also has a user friendly set of messages. (Friendly as in telling them: the page was intended for a particular superseded version of our software; providing a link to the next releases page; AND, if the that release & the current release don't match, a link to the most current page with an upgrade recommendation.

Since changes are incremental, this could allow them to step through release revisions or skip to the most current.)

Our site has a template with the current software version. Page title links (OUTSIDE the main manual chapter pages) use templates to transclude the release number into the pagename:

  [ [Software{ {man version} }-ch1#subsection|feature name] ]

I'll have to figure how to use subclusion together with transclusion to build the content of the user messages.

I'm mostly looking for help with building a templates with the magic words to suppress indexing, categorization.  

Thanks in advance

-Brian

Here an obsolete MediaWiki page with a primitive banner

[[https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Support_desk/old|Project:Support desk/old]]

[Skizzerz]

You could use ParserFunctions #ifeq to compare the version a page is for with the current version, and display the warning banner and related things if they don't match. More complicated things can be done as well by making use of other functions that can split strings up to compare each component of a version number independently. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions for some more details on the ParserFunctions extension. Other extensions exist which add even more capabilities compared to what is listed there.