I think the problem with the content that is on the template page is probably just a path issue. Since it is not displaying the content your host may have php error reporting turned off. To see if there is an error occurring on this page you should add in the following code to the top of the page:
<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors','on');
?>
If you have placed the code from the CMS admin directly into the template and the template is not in the root of the site you will need to adjust the paths of the includes. If your template is in a templates directory then you should update the paths to have a ../ in them like this:
<?php include "../the rest of the include"
As for the links please post back with exactly what you are pasting into the page in the CMS admin, I can check it out and do some tests to help determine what may be going on.
