Adding tooltips to admin page form fields using the TipTip plugin

Documentation is a very important step of plugin development. It allows users to understand how to configure the plugins you create. That being said, users will not typically go very far to find the information they need, resulting in many unnecessary questions in discussion forums or emails.

As discussed in Chapter 3, User Settings and Administration Pages, one way to provide documentation is to create a Help tab that appears in the top-right corner of the plugin's configuration panel. While that approach is much easier for users than to find a README file or visit the official WordPress plugin repository, it still requires them to actively seek and click a link to open that section. That's where tooltips come into play. Using a jQuery plugin to render clean, good-looking tooltips, we can add documentation to a plugin that appears contextually based on the currently selected field.

Getting ready

You...