What Is a Toggle?

A toggle is a switch that has two positions, on and off. It is commonly used in everyday technology and programming to enable or disable different features.

Toggles are a great tool for continuous development, especially when testing new functionality in a smaller audience. They allow you to validate a feature with a small subset of your audience before rolling it out to the entire population, and can help reduce the risk that a new product release will flop.

Using a toggle allows you to hide content in your presentation view, including article sections, containers, images, maps, key/value items, prompt linked articles, quotes, aloud boxes, and character relations. However, there are some technical limitations that prevent some elements from being toggled. For example, if a toggable section contains a mention link to another article, it cannot be hidden. Additionally, dynamic content like spoilers that load later may break visibility toggles.

It is important to maintain a clean codebase with your toggles and ensure that they are well managed. Avoid letting toggles sit idle for long periods of time, and ensure that you have a process for pruning them when they are no longer relevant to your users.

It is also important to name your toggles appropriately. This will give context to someone who is debugging your code and will help them understand what the current state of the toggle is. For example, you should use the term “Feature Toggle” when your toggle is intended to last for only a few releases before it’s changed, and “Flag” when your toggle is more permanent and needs to be maintained over a longer period of time.