implementing a centralized content “show-do-not-show” toggle?

Question

I have many custom templates for different post types, and I am manually inserting a social share bar inside the 'entry-meta' footer in each of those templates. I need a simple centralized way to disable the social share bar without hacking into the plugin.

Basically I have this setup so far:

In functions.php:

update_option( 'show_social_bar', 'true' );

In my templates I have this check:

if( get_option( 'show_social_bar' ) === 'true' ) {
  // show my social share links 
}

If I need to turn the bar off, I just set the option to 'false' in functions.php. This somehow seems inefficient. Is there a more sensible way?

Answer 1

It's a bad practice to update an option on every page load. You should use a constant instead.

define('SHOW_SOCIAL_BAR', true); //functions.php

if(SHOW_SOCIAL_BAR){
    //Do Something
}

Answer 2

I think I would make it a checkbox on a settings page, that way you're not setting something every load (because MySQL writes are slow) and you have a user-friendly way to make the change.