The TipTip library turns regular HTML title tags into nice looking tooltips that appear when users position their mouse cursor over an item or select it.

This recipe starts by downloading the TipTip script from the plugin author's website. Once downloaded, we only extract two of the three files that the archive contains. The third file is not needed, as it is a non-compact version of the script.

Once we have the desired files in place, we load them in the admin page header by adding calls to the wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style functions in the callback that was already associated with the admin_enqueue_script action hook. Similar to wp_enqueue_style, the wp_enqueue_script function has five parameters, which indicate the name of the script, the location of the script file, a list of any dependencies for the script, a version number, and an option to indicate if the script should be loaded in the site header or footer.

Once the library is loaded, activating the tooltips is quite simple. First, we select a class name for our items and add it to all the items that are destined to have help text associated with them. Then, we add the help text in a title tag on each item. Note that the item in question could be anything from a div to a form input component or a table row. Finally, we make a call to a jQuery function to find all the items that have the right class and execute the TipTip function on them. After execution, all the selected items will have their title text appear as tooltips.