Administrators often want to manage a set of terms that gets used in a predefined way throughout a site. These could be industry-specific terms that change sporadically or brand names that might change because of impending mergers or acquisitions. To do this, administrators can set a global variable.

Global variables can be set generically across all publishing targets in the CMS, or they can be set specifically for each publishing target. This gives administrators the ability to update these terms at a precise scope. This is especially helpful for when similar sites need to be produced on a regional or brand-specific basis, where the majority of the site is the same at two different URLs, but certain terms change within the content.

Administrators also have the option of assigning a global variable's value through an XPath query rather than hard coding it. This makes the global variable dynamic rather than static. For example, consider a site whose site control contains a field called ClientName. By creating a global variable ClientName and assigning it an XPath value of /*/ClientName, the variable is dynamically updated in a page's body copy to reflect the current value of the ClientName field in the site control.