Thread

I’m reading through ExpressionEngine2 A Quick Start Guide and it talks about using this:

{preload_replace:my_blog="<a href='http://website.com/blog'>my blog</a>"}

At the top of a template and adding {my_blog} throughout the template but I was wondering what would be the reason to use this over something like a snippet?

You could just as easily use a global variable for this.  A snippet would only be needed if you were going to be using any expression engine tags - snippets parse EE tags, whereas global variables do not.  So for a quick comparison:

As a global variable (with no EE tags):

my blog

As a snippet (since it contains EE tags):

my blog

But the result of each is the same.  Performance-wise, the global variable might be ever so slightly faster simply because nothing inside of it needs to be parsed.

Different scope is another reason.  pre_load replace variables only hold scope for the specific template they are created in.  Snippets are global.