“Constant” - It’s a Local Variable. What’s That?

Posted September 16, 2004

I feel compelled to write something today on Interchange, since I have working with it on a very regular basis.

As I was looking through one of the “include” pages in my site files, I was trying to figure out what everything means.

__CONSTANT__

This was what I was trying to figure out, what is this.

Basically, this is a local variable.

When in the administration interface, click on “tables”. In tables, at the bottom you will find a category called “variables”. In this section is where you set variables such as __CONSTANT__. In this case, __CONSTANT__ is set to a string value of “Red”. This is then used in multiple spots throughout the site.

What the advantage is, I am not sure. I would assume it would make for a very quick change for something very simple. But doesn’t seem like much of an advanced option in terms of design, because making a font color change, by spelling out the color is so uncommon, not to mention, not a light decision, that it doesn’t seem to fit into my design arsenal.