What Is a Toggle?

July 24, 2024 by No Comments

Toggle is a switch in a piece of technology that turns something on or off. In software applications, toggles can also be used to enable or disable features.

In the context of content organization, toggles can be used to hide sections or items from visitors while viewing an article. This is similar to the way a navigation element like a Table of Contents or sidebar menu can help minimize scrolling while allowing users to find what they’re looking for. However, this type of toggle does have some technical limitations that can prevent it from being as effective as other navigation elements. For example, content that’s linked to a pin on the map or article previews that are loaded later can break visibility toggles.

Another common use of Toggles is to implement A/B testing. When a toggle is set to ON, a subset of users see the new version of the application that’s being tested and when the toggle is set to OFF, all users see the original version of the application. This technique helps reduce the risk of a major release going untested and allows engineers to validate new functionality with a smaller group of users before full rollout.

Toggle configuration is often stored in static files which can become cumbersome at a certain scale as changes to the toggle’s state can require re-deploying the entire deployment. In order to mitigate this issue many organizations choose to move the toggle configuration into some sort of centralized store, often an existing application DB. This approach is usually accompanied by the build-out of some form of admin UI that allows system operators, testers and product managers to view and modify the toggle’s configuration.