Question

I wonder if there is a way to create reusable values in Drupal 7. For example in our mortgage website if we update rates in one place it updates everywhere we have used it.

Example: Instead of writing rates in our post multiple times we simply type some thing like this **[variable 1]** and it prints the value of variable 1.

Answer 1

I’d suggest taking a look at the Token API and the Token Module.

In Drupal 6, token handling was provided by the contrib Token Module only, but it was used and supported by quite a lot of modules and became one of the widespread de facto ‘standard’ modules. This led to its functionality getting incorporated into Drupal 7 core – however, some parts got left out, so you might still need the D7 module version, depending on your use cases.

Concerning your example, you could e.g. provide a global ‘[rate]’ token from a custom module via hook_token_info (declares the tokens your module offers) and hook_tokens (provides the actual token replacement values when needed). The replacement process is triggered by calls to token_replace(), which will often be invoked by the system or other modules already, but you can do it yourself as well when needed.

In the end, this would allow you to type [rate] in your content, which would result in it getting replaced by the value your module provides during rendering.