What Is Toggle?

Togle

Togle is an app that lets you manage the appearance of long text on your site by adding customizable “show more” and “show less” links. These links allow you to control how long text appears on your site and ensure it does not displace conversion-driving content like products, specs, and social links.

Toggle Definition

In computing, toggle is used for any switch that has only two possible outcomes – on and off. Typically, toggle switches are found in options or preferences lists and they usually only require a simple click or press of a button to change an option’s state.

Management of Toggle Configuration

In the past many organizations used static configuration files to manage toggle configuration. This approach is simple and relatively straight forward but can become cumbersome as teams scale to a number of servers.

As a result, many organizations now move Toggle Configuration into a centralized store. This can be an existing application DB or a new system with admin UI that allows system operators, testers and product managers to view and modify toggle configurations.

Savvy teams keep their inventory of Feature Toggles low by removing any toggles which no longer serve a purpose. This can be as simple as adding a removal task to the team’s backlog whenever a Release Toggle is first introduced or it can involve creating “expiration dates” for toggles which don’t have any future value to a release.

Permissioning Toggles are another type of toggle that may be very long lived compared to other categories of toggles – for a per-request permissioning toggle the decision to enable a feature or not is only made when a user asks for it. As a result, these toggles may be much more dynamic than other categories of toggles, often living at the scale of multiple years.