A toggle is a switch that can be turned on or off. It’s commonly used in technology, computing, and programming to provide users with a way to switch between different settings or modes. For example, you might toggle between screens as you video chat with two friends at once, or you might use the toggles on a machine to switch between different functions, such as printing and scanning.

When used properly, toggles can make complex user interfaces more intuitive and easier to understand. It’s important to consider the context in which you’re using a toggle and provide clear, direct labels that describe the current state. It’s also best to avoid ambiguity by providing visual cues like color changes or animation to help users understand the toggle’s state change.

Toggles can be a useful way to enable or disable features for specific segments of your audience. This makes it easy to offer personalized experiences without having to modify the code base or update your entire website or application. However, you must be careful to only use toggles when they’re needed and to keep the number of toggles low. Otherwise, they can become overwhelming and create confusion for users.

The Visibility Toggle is an easy-to-use article configuration tool that allows you to hide or show content within an article at a moment’s notice. Unlike our other toggles, which hide or display only sections of your site or application, this tool allows you to hide or show content in the article itself. Content hidden with this feature is not actually removed from the article, so anyone who knows how to inspect web pages can still see it.

Similarly, some content may still be visible if the toggle is enabled or disabled. This includes things like article links, comments, and subscriber group containers (content wrapped between [container]…[/container] tags). If you’re not sure whether a toggle will work with your site’s architecture, please test it before using it on a live page.

Toggles are a great way to manage the configuration of new software features before they’re ready for release. They support newer agile development processes and allow teams to release features into production that are still under development. This can be a significant improvement over older traditional waterfall models, where new features had to go through lengthy testing and QA cycles before they could be integrated into trunk code.

There are several ways to configure toggles, ranging from the simple but less dynamic approach of commenting on the code with #ifdefs through to more sophisticated approaches that involve preprocessor features and other APIs. It’s important to be consistent with your toggle configuration across your codebase and deploy a process for deleting old toggles once they’ve reached the end of their lifecycle. This helps prevent the buildup of idle toggles that increase maintenance overhead for your team. You can do this by adding code cleanup tasks to your team’s backlog or making it part of your software management tools.