Phenomena treated by non-equilibrium thermodynamics can be very effectively described by thermodynamic variational principles. The remarkable advantage of such an approach consists in possibility to account for an arbitrary number of constraints among state or kinetic variables stemming, e.g., from conservation laws or balance equations. As shown in the current paper, the variational principles can provide original evolution equations for the state variables implicitly respecting the constraints. Moreover, the variational approach allows formulating the problem directly in discrete state variables and deriving their evolution equations without the necessity to solve partial differential equations. The variational approach makes it also possible to use different kinetic variables in formulation of dissipation and dissipation function.