Imagine this scenario: You have built an ExpressionEngine website for a client. Everything works great, but there’s a problem: the client needs to be able to change little pieces of relatively static text. You don’t want to let him into the templates because, well, he’ll screw them up. You don’t want to let him access global template variables for the same reason, and besides, those variables don’t have any formatting options. How can you allow the client to change data—such as the company’s address, or maybe even that “Welcome to our website” text on the homepage—quickly and easily?
There are several options, but here’s another one: GeeVar. GeeVar allows you to create global variables using the control panel’s publish and edit interface. In short, each variable is a weblog entry. That means you can have as many or as few as you need, and you can format each variable’s value however you like (e.g. “none”, XHTML, or even using something like Textile or a wysiwyg editor). The variables are retrieved without the extra processing weight of the Weblog Module. As a bonus, GeeVar’s variables are cached, so the plugin only two database queries per page load. Thus, you can use as many GeeVar tag pairs as you like, anywhere in your templates (or embedded templates) without fear of ramping up your query count.