I have a gaming website of 150+ pages that re-use a lot of items/abilities/links and text phrases through-out each page. For example, for visitors to know the website is up-to-date, each page says that its updated to the latest "x" patch.
Rather than manually having to go through each page and update "x" patch to "x.1" patch every few months, I'd like to just store the current patch in a variable or token(?) and display that on the pages.
This is my first site with Drupal, so I'm still very much learning about Modules, Tokens and the PHP firewall(?) that exists in Drupal. One of the struggles I've dealt with so far is not being able to use custom PHP variables inside of nodes. What I had done before Drupal was store all the items/links/abilities/patch name variables inside a PHP file, and pull it into the top of my sites template file. That way, I could display any of the variables, like print $patch;
whenever I needed and it would display the current patch.
It won't do this in Drupal unless I include('') that PHP file within that content field. This is obviously a bad idea because then the PHP variable file is being recalled and reloaded numerous times even for one page.