Can someone help me understand how to enter "editable" text in a drawing template that I am currently creating?  I am new to Inkscape and am wandering around the application trying to complete this task.

Excellent tutorials including Text in Inkscape are in this special edition, written by forum member Xav:

http://dl.fullcirclemagazine.org/issueIS02_en.pdf

Look for part 10.

Have a nice day.

TD

Here's a tutorial about templates.  It's a bit dated, but still entirely relevant:  http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/using-templates-in-inkscape

As long as you never convert the text to path, it will remain editable.  Once it's converted to path, you won't be able to edit it.

Note that for ultimate viewers of the documents to see the same font, you will probably need to convert it to paths.  But as long as the text in the template remains as text, it will be editable.

If you do need to convert the text to paths, in the docs which are created from the template, and you think you might someday need to edit that text; you could save the text as text, somewhere in the file, like in a hidden layer, or outside the page border, just in case.

But once you save the template, with the text as text, and you don't convert the text to path in the template, it will always be editable.