So for the past few days, me and Cbv (sorry, don't know your name) have been playing around with templates. We're also trying to make them more universal by adding an IF statement in order to only show things we want it to. The problem is that we can't get it to work (hence all the editing on Template:Application). Let me get to the point, I was reading the Wikipedia documentation (this is where I got the idea from) and it seams we need to add a ParserFuncations Extension in order to access these features. Please check this
WikiMedia.org page to see what I'm talking about: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
It would be very nice to have this features since it allows for Templates to be used anywhere possible and still look good. An installation guide is available in the link provided above toward the end (just check the table of contents).