- Author: Scott Reilly
- Version: 4.2
- First released: 2009-07-15
- Last update: 2022-03-23
- Compatibility: WP 4.9 – 5.9.10
- Download: [ zip ]
- Description:
Add hover text (aka tooltips) to content in posts. Handy for providing explanations of names, terms, phrases, abbreviations, and acronyms.
-
Extended Description
This plugin allows you to easily define help text that appears when a visitor hovers their mouse over a word or phrase in a post or page.
Via the plugin’s settings, simply specify the words or phrases that you want to be associated with hover text, and of course, the desired hover texts themselves. The format is quite simple; an example of which is shown here:
WP => WordPress Matt => Matt Mullenweg The Scooby Shack => the bar where the gang hangs out
Additional features of the plugin controlled both via settings and filters:
- Hover text can be enabled for comments (it isn’t by default)
- Hover text can be made case insensitive (it is case sensitive by default)
- Hover text can be limited to doing only one replacement per term, per post (by default, all occurrences of a term are given hovertext)
- Hover text can be rendered using the default browser tooltip (by default, the better-looking qTip2 library is used)
- Hover text can be expanded to affect other filters
Note: This is not the same as my Text Replace plugin, which defines terms or phrases that you want replaced by replacement text when displayed on your site. Text Hover instead adds the hover text as additional information for when visitors hover over the term, which is otherwise displayed in the post as you typed it.
Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage
Developer Documentation
Developer documentation can be found in DEVELOPER-DOCS.md. That documentation covers the numerous hooks provided by the plugin. Those hooks are listed below to provide an overview of what’s available.
c2c_text_hover_filters
: Customize what hooks get text hover applied to them.c2c_text_hover_third_party_filters
: Customize what third-party hooks get text hover applied to them.c2c_text_hover_filter_priority
: Override the default priority for thec2c_text_hover
filter.c2c_text_hover
Customize or override the setting defining all of the text hover terms and their hover texts.c2c_text_hover_comments
: Customize or override the setting indicating if text hover should be enabled in comments.c2c_text_hover_case_sensitive
: Customize or override the setting indicating if text hover should be case sensitive.c2c_text_hover_once
: Customize or override the setting indicating if text hovering should be limited to once per term per piece of text being processed regardless of how many times the term appears.c2c_text_hover_use_pretty_tooltips
: Customize or override the setting indicating if prettier tooltips should be used.
Find out more at the plugin’s WordPress Plugin Repository page.
-
Screenshots
Click to see full-size image.
-
The admin options page for the plugin, where you define the terms/acronyms/phrases and their related hover text
-
The plugin in action for a post when the mouse is hovering over a defined hover text term using the pretty tooltips
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The plugin in action for a post when the mouse is hovering over a defined hover text term using default browser tooltips (in this case, Chrome on OSX)
-
-
Installation
- Whether installing or updating, whether this plugin or any other, it is always advisable to back-up your data before starting
- Install via the built-in WordPress plugin installer. Or download and unzip
text-hover.zip
inside the plugins directory for your site (typicallywp-content/plugins/
) - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
- Go to the
Settings
->Text Hover
admin settings page and customize the settings (namely to define the terms/abbreviations and their explanations). - Optional: Configure other plugin settings as desired.
- Use the terms/abbreviations in posts and/or pages (terms/abbreviations appearing in existing posts will also be affected by this plugin)
-
Release Log
4.2 (2022-03-22)
- Change: Disallow all but the most basic formatting markup within hover text. Props Rohan Chaudhari.
- As continues to be the case, markup only ever works in the better looking tooltips.
- This only enforces the already documented limited markup support to basic formatting tags.
- Existing text hovers will be unaffected until the next time settings get saved.
- New: Add DEVELOPER-DOCS.md and move hooks documentation into it
- Change: Remove settings page helptext about ‘replace_once’ setting not applying to multibyte strings since it’s no longer true
- Change: Lowercase the displayed values for ‘when’ setting
- Change: Move ‘code’ tags out of translatable string for ‘when’ setting
- Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.9+
- Change: Remove “A screenshot of” prefix from all screenshot captions
- Change: Tweak installation instructions in README.md
- Change: Fix typo in function docblock
- Change: Update copyright date (2022)
- New: Add a few more possible TODO items
4.1 (2021-06-29)
- New: Add new setting “More filters” to allow for user-specified filters to be processed
- Change: Update plugin framework to 064
- 064:
- New: For checkbox settings, support a ‘more_help’ config option for defining help text to appear below checkbox and its label
- Fix: Fix URL for plugin listing donate link
- Change: Store donation URL as object variable
- Change: Update strings used for settings page donation link
- 063:
- Fix: Simplify settings initialization to prevent conflicts with other plugins
- Change: Remove ability to detect plugin settings page before current screen is set, as it is no longer needed
- Change: Enqueue thickbox during
'admin_enqueue_scripts'
action instead of during'init'
- Change: Use
is_plugin_admin_page()
inhelp_tabs()
instead of reproducing its functionality - Change: Trigger a debugging warning if
is_plugin_admin_page()
is used before'admin_init'
action is fired - 062:
- Change: Update
is_plugin_admin_page()
to useget_current_screen()
when available - Change: Actually prevent object cloning and unserialization by throwing an error
- Change: Check that there is a current screen before attempting to access its property
- Change: Remove ‘type’ attribute from
style
tag - Change: Incorporate commonly defined styling for inline_textarea
- 061:
- Fix bug preventing settings from getting saved
- 060:
- Rename class from
c2c_{PluginName}_Plugin_051
toc2c_Plugin_060
- Move string translation handling into inheriting class making the plugin framework code plugin-agnostic
- Add abstract function
get_c2c_string()
as a getter for translated strings - Replace all existing string usage with calls to
get_c2c_string()
- Add abstract function
- Handle WordPress’s deprecation of the use of the term “whitelist”
- Change: Rename
whitelist_options()
toallowed_options()
- Change: Use
add_allowed_options()
instead of deprecatedadd_option_whitelist()
for WP 5.5+ - Change: Hook
allowed_options
filter instead of deprecatedwhitelist_options
for WP 5.5+
- Change: Rename
- New: Add initial unit tests (currently just covering
is_wp_version_cmp()
andget_c2c_string()
) - Add
is_wp_version_cmp()
as a utility to compare current WP version against a given WP version - Refactor
contextual_help()
to be easier to read, and correct function docblocks - Don’t translate urlencoded donation email body text
- Add inline comments for translators to clarify purpose of placeholders
- Change PHP package name (make it singular)
- Tweak inline function description
- Note compatibility through WP 5.7+
- Update copyright date (2021)
- 051:
- Allow setting integer input value to include commas
- Use
number_format_i18n()
to format integer value within input field - Update link to coffee2code.com to be HTTPS
- Update
readme_url()
to refer to plugin’s readme.txt on plugins.svn.wordpress.org - Remove defunct line of code
- New: Add
get_default_filters()
as getter for core filters, third-party filters, or both - Change: Allow displayed dropdown values for ‘when’ setting to be translated
- Change: Improve settings page help text by adding, rephrasing, relocating, and tweaaking some formatting
- Change: Change text_to_hover setting from being a textarea to inline textarea
- Change: Move translation of all parent class strings into main plugin file
- Change: Output newlines after block-level tags in settings page
- Change: Omit ‘cols’ attribute for textarea since it is overridden
- Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.7+
- Change: Update copyright date (2021)
- Change: Change plugin’s short description
- Change: Tweak plugin’s readme.txt tags
- Change: Sync installation instructions in README.txt with what’s in readme.txt
- Fix: Use correct textdomain for a string translation
- Unit tests:
- Change: Restructure unit test directories and files into
tests/
top-level directory- Change: Move
bin/
intotests/
- Change: Move
tests/bootstrap.php
intotests/phpunit/
- Change: In bootstrap, store path to plugin file constant so its value can be used within that file and in test file
- Change: Move
tests/*.php
intotests/phpunit/tests/
- Change: Remove ‘test-‘ prefix from unit test files
- Change: Rename
phpunit.xml
tophpunit.xml.dist
per best practices
- Change: Move
- New: Add additional punctuation-related test cases
- New: Add helper function
get_core_filters()
andget_3rd_party_filters()
to DRY up data reuse
- Change: Restructure unit test directories and files into
- New: Add a few more possible TODO items
- Change: Updated screenshot for settings page
4.0 (2020-07-16)
- New: Add new setting to allow control over when text hovers are handled early or late in text processing process
- New: Add filter
c2c_text_hover_filter_priority
for filtering hook priority for text hover handler - New: Allow text to hover string to begin and/or end in punctuation.
- New: Add TODO.md and move existing TODO list from top of main plugin file into it
- Change: Update plugin framework to 050
- 050:
- Allow a hash entry to literally have ‘0’ as a value without being entirely omitted when saved
- Output donation markup using
printf()
rather than using string concatenation - Update copyright date (2020)
- Note compatibility through WP 5.4+
- Drop compatibility with versions of WP older than 4.9
- Change: Remove plugin setting page help text indicating order matters (it hasn’t since v3.8)
- Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.4+
- Change: Drop compatibility with versions of WP older than 4.9
- Change: Update links to coffee2code.com to be HTTPS
- Unit tests:
- New: Add
get_filter_names()
as a helper method for getting the default and third-party filter names - New: Add
unhook_default_filters()
as a helper method to unhook plugin’s default filters hooked totext_hover()
- New: Add test case for hover text that includes HTML
- New: Add tests for
enqueue_scripts()
,options_page_description()
- New: Add test for setting name
- New: Add tests for setting defaults
- New: Add explicit tests to ensure falsey hover text values don’t alter original text
- New: Add explicit tests to ensure text replacements don’t occur within
abbr
tag contents or in any tag attributes - Change: Store plugin instance in test object to simplify referencing it
- Change: Remove unnecessary unregistering of hooks in
tearDown()
- Change: Add
$priority
argument totest_hover_applies_to_default_filters()
- Change: Remove duplicative
reset_options()
call - Change: Rename unit test function so that it is treated as a unit test
- Change: Use HTTPS for link to WP SVN repository in bin script for configuring unit tests (and delete commented-out code)
- New: Add
- Change: Update screenshot
- Change: Disallow all but the most basic formatting markup within hover text. Props Rohan Chaudhari.
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Copyright & Disclaimer
Copyright © 2009-2025 by Scott Reilly (aka coffee2code)This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. -
Discussion / Support
Have any questions, comments, or suggestions? Please provide them via the plugin’s WordPress.org support forum. I’ll do my best to reply in a timely fashion and help as best I can.
Unfortunately, I cannot provide guaranteed support, nor do I provide support via any other means.
Was this plugin useful useful to you? Consider giving it a rating. If you’re inclined to give it a poor rating, please first post to the support forum to give me a chance to address or explain the situation.
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