Available on: every plan in Blocks text editor · Help article →
Quick note: Anyone can create and manage variables, but inserting one is new-editor only.
Someone in a meeting has decided the Pro plan is now the Professional plan. It's Thursday. You have found eleven of the fourteen articles that say Pro, you are fairly sure the twelfth is buried inside a Clip, and you have started to resent a word.
Variables are the fix. Define a piece of text once, give it a name, and drop it into any article or Clip. When the value changes you change it in one place, and every article that uses it quietly catches up.
What this actually saves you
- Names. Plans, features, the app, the company. A rename stops being an afternoon and becomes a text field.
- Contact details. "Email us at {support_email}" survives every reorg, every new inbox, every time support hours shift by an hour.
- Prices and limits. Billing changes in January. You change five values. You go back to your day.
- The numbers people quote at you. Refund windows, retention periods, notice periods. The ones where an out of date article turns into a genuinely unpleasant ticket.
- Clips that carry values. Your "Contact support" Clip is in fifty articles. Put the address in a variable and that one Clip works across every help center you run, with the right details in each.
You stay in charge of the values
A variable is a default, not a rule. One article needs to say something different? Override it right there, and nothing else moves. The customer on a bespoke plan. The region with its own opening hours. The article that keeps the old wording on purpose because it is documenting history.
We didn't want you choosing between "identical everywhere" and "typed out by hand", because that choice is exactly why most people never bother with reusable content at all.
Why we built it
We kept hearing the same story from people running big knowledge bases. They had written good articles, and then reality moved. A name, a price, an address, a number in a policy. Everything they had written was still true except for one word, and there was no way to change that word without opening every article by hand.
Clips already solved this for whole blocks of content. Variables solve it for the small pieces inside them, which are, annoyingly, the pieces that change most often.
Set one up and tell us what you made it. We are collecting the good ones 🙋