Question: There are certain values that are liable to appear in many places on my site (corporate-owned stores, independent stores, # of brands carried, and so forth) that content authors and editors are not likely to keep up-to-date very well on every single page in which they appear.

I can put them in variables in (e.g.) settings.php, and then put PHP snippets in any nodes that need to use them, but that has obvious downsides: 

1. content authors cannot update the values when they change
2. content authors cannot edit the text that contains the PHP snippets
3. unless of course I give them permission to do that, but that's probably not a great idea

I'm currently experimenting with using the [Token Filter module](http://drupal.org/project/token_filter) to allow putting tokens like `[node:field_corporate_stores]` in content fields in a node. This works just fine if that field is on the node that also has the body content in which it is being replaced. But of course that would defeat the purpose: I want ***one*** node that contains the values, and to be able to use an indefinite number of other nodes that will consume the values. But I don't see how to do that.

How do I define `data_node` for a token like `[data_node:field_corporate_stores]`??? (Without using any PHP snippets in the node.)

Answer: 
I would take a look at the [Custom Filter](http://drupal.org/project/customfilter) module. I looked at it a year or so ago but decided to roll my own, but from memory, it allows you to specify your own systemwide token substitutions.
You can have a admin form which will capture all these values and store it in the variables table. Then you can use [Token Var](http://drupal.org/project/token_var) module to use those values as tokens.

Note : Currently it supports only non array values, but it can easily be extended to support the arrays too.