One thing that I don’t particularly care for is hard-coding snippets of text into themes, especially if there’s a possibility that they may need to be changed down the road. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t have anything to suit out-of-the-box. With the release of WordPress 3.0, however, custom post types were introduced, which are entirely perfect for this! What I did is add a custom post type of “variable” that are not public, have a UI in the admin and support the title, editor and excerpt.