Description
As a content author, you constantly try to keep the content on your site up-to-date. The challenge increases as many a times the same content is repeated at various places on your site. Add to that the content keeps changing over time making it more difficult to keep your site up-to-date. Here are some examples.
Features of a product or service you offer (you may end up repeating these on the product page as well as blog posts)
Links with promotion codes that change from time-to-time (again the links may spread across your site)
Content promotion (such as, promoting content from development site to production site where you may need to update links to point to the production site)
C9 Variables helps in all these areas and many more. It facilitates authoring reusable content as variables. Then, you can refer to these variables from other content (such as, blog post or page) instead of repeating the content. C9 Variables will automatically show the latest content of variables when the post or page is loaded. If you need to make updates, simply update the variable in one place and the changes will be available automatically when the referring page or post is reloaded.
Here are some examples.
Example#1: Variable for Product Features
Lets say you want to create reusable content for managing your product features that you would like to show at multiple places on your site, such as, the product page, blog posts, etc.
Create a variable using C9 Variables, say
ProductFeatures
, with the following content.
html

• Create new content.
• Modify content.
• Search content.
• Delete content.

Now you can refer to this variable from another post or page using the
c9-vars-insert
shortcode. For example, here is a blog post snippet referring to the above
ProductFeatures
variable.
html
Welcome to the release of our latest product that offers the following key features.
[c9-vars-insert name=”ProductFeatures”]
We are quite optimistic that this will help you tremendously in managing your site.
Notice how you did not have to repeat the entire list of features. Next time you add more to the feature list, you can simply update the
ProductFeatures
variable and all the content using this variable will get the latest feature list when reloaded.
See Demo.
Example#2: Variable for Managing Promotion Code
Lets say you constantly run promotion on your site and you have links from various pages and posts on your site that should provide the latest promotion code. You want to ensure there are no obsolete promotion links. Here, you will create a variable to store the promotion code and use it from other content on your site. For the purpose of demonstration, lets use the promotion code value as
CLOUDNINE
.
Create a variable, say
Promo Code
, with content as
CLOUDNINE
.
Refer to this variable wherever you would like to access the promotion code. Example
html
Click here to claim your promotion code.
Next time your promotion code changes, simply update the
Promo Code
variable and all references will be updated dynamically.
See Demo.
Example#3: Variable for Site
Lets say you run a development site where you author your content first and then promote to production. This site contains links to other pages on your site. When you promote this content to the production site, you want to make sure the links now refer to the production site without having to do a search and replace or other manual and error prone tasks. C9 Variables makes this task simple.
Create a variable for site, say
site
, with value as
example-dev.local
in your development site.
Create the same variable
site
with value as
example.com
in your production site.
Now, you can author links in your content hassle free using the
site
variable. Example
html
Click here to visit the MyCoolProduct.
/blogs
When this content is promoted to production, the links will be dynamically updated to use the production
site
value.
See Demo.
Example#4: Nested Variables
Yes, variables can be nested! That is, one variable can refer to another variable. In fact, a variable’s content can use shortcodes from other plugins as well. Here’s an example.
Create a variable, say
Nested Content
, that refers to the above
ProductFeatures
variable with the following content.
html
The following content is from the ProductFeatures variable.
[c9-vars-insert name=’productfeatures’]
Now, wherever
Nested Content
variable is used, it will automatically substitute the content with the latest value for
ProductFeatures
as well.
See Demo.
Example#5: Variable for Magic Button!
This is a common case of content management wherein the content is being actively developed in the development site for a particular release. The content is also published to production, but not made visible until the release date. This is accomplished by using a variable to act as a magic button!
Create a variable for magic button, say
Magic Button
, that uses the HTML
div
tag and
display
attribute. You can also use a version based name, such as,
Magic Button V1.0
. To keep the content visible on the development site, set
Magic Button
variable value to the following.
html