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.

<ul>
  <li>Create new content.</li>
  <li>Modify content.</li>
  <li>Search content.</li>
  <li>Delete content.</li>
</ul>

• 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.

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

<a href='http://example.com/product?coupon=[c9-vars-insert name="Promo Code"]'>Click here</a> 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

<a href='http://[c9-vars-insert name="site"]/products/MyCoolProduct'>Click here</a> to visit the MyCoolProduct.
<a href='http://[c9-vars-insert name="site"]'>/blogs</a>

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.

The following content is from the <strong>ProductFeatures</strong> 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.

<div style="display: block;">

• To keep the content hidden on the production site, set Magic Button variable value to the following.

<div style="display: none;">

• Author the content. Following is a sample content for demonstration purpose.

[c9-vars-insert name=’magic-button’]
This content shows the features of the latest release.
</div>

• Push content to production without a worry that it'll be available to the users before the release date.
• On the release date, simply switch the Magic Button variable value in production to make the content visible.

See Demo.

Example#6: Variable for Content Promotion

This is another common case in the documentation world and hence worth calling out. Lets say you are preparing documentation for the next release of your product and you are working in a draft space that's only accessible to select customers and employees. You want the links to point to the draft space. Once the product is released, you want to the links to dynamically point to the published space.

• Create a variable for space, say space, with value as draft.
• Have your referring pages use the above variable when referring to the links. For example

Restricted page
<a href='http://example.com/documentation?space=[c9-vars-insert name="space"]'>Documentation</a>
<a href='http://example.com/documentation/myproduct/space=[c9-vars-insert name="space"]'>My Product Documentation</a>

• Now, the select people with access to the above page will see the links that are pointing to the draft space.
• When you are ready for the release, you can simply update the space to published and make the above restricted page publicly accessible. And, all the content will be publicly available. Simple!

Keep building awesome reusable content!