Text Hover
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.
Consider an alternative
Text Hover shows warning signs in 2026 — compare the alternatives below before installing. It runs on 1K+ sites, is rated 4.5/5 and was last updated 5 years ago, and scores 37/100 on our health check.
- No update in 4 years
- Only tested up to WordPress 5.9 (latest is 7.1)
How does it stack up?
Side-by-side on installs, updates, ratings & supportDaily downloads
Download spikes usually follow a new release — each site that auto-updates counts as a download.
Rankings
Where Text Hover stands todayWordPress.org search rankings
Live position in the plugin search, top 100| Keyword | Position |
|---|---|
| abbreviations | #43 |
| acronyms | #26 |
| help | >100 |
| terms | >100 |
| tooltips | >100 |
Version adoption
Share of active sites per release.
Rating breakdown
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 from 17 reviews
About Text Hover
From the official readme · v4.2Description
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_hoverfilter.c2c_text_hoverCustomize 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.
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.zipinside the plugins directory for your site (typicallywp-content/plugins/) - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
- Go to the
Settings->Text Hoveradmin 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)
Frequently asked questions
In my posts, hover text terms do not appear any differently than regular text (though I can hover over them and see the hover text)! What gives?
The plugin currently makes use of the standard HTML tag abbr to specify the terms and their hover text. Browsers have default handling and display of abbr. It’s possibly that the CSS for your theme is overriding the default display. I use the following in my site’s styles.css file to ensure it displays for me in the manner I prefer (which, by the same token, you can use more CSS formatting to further format the hover terms) : abbr { text-decoration: underline dotted #000; }
Does this plugin modify the post content in the database?
No. The plugin filters post content on-the-fly.
Will this work for posts I wrote prior to installing this plugin?
Yes, if they include strings that you’ve now defined as terms.
What post fields get handled by this plugin?
By default, the plugin filters the post content, post excerpt fields, widget text, and optionally comments and comment excerpts. You can use the ‘c2c_text_hover_filters’ filter to modify that behavior (see Hooks section).
How can I get text hover to apply for post titles (or something not processed for text hover by default)?
The easiest way would be to add “the_title” (or some other filter’s name) as a line in the “More filters” setting. That setting allows any additional specified filters to be processed for text hovers. You can also programmatically add to the list of filters that get processed for text hover terms. See the Hooks section for an example.
Is the plugin case sensitive?
By default, yes. There is a setting you can change to make it case insensitive. Or you can use the ‘c2c_text_hover_case_sensitive’ filter (see Hooks section). Note that the option applies to all terms/abbreviations. If you want to selectively have terms/acronyms be case insensitive, you should leave the case sensitive setting checked and add a listing for each case variation you wish to support.
Will all instances of a given term be hovered in a single post?
By default, yes. There is a setting you can change so that only the first occurrence of the term in the post gets hovered. Or if you are a coder, you can use the ‘c2c_text_hover_replace_once’ filter (see Hooks section).
Can I style the tooltip?
Yes, but only if you have the pretty tooltips enabled (via settings or the filter). The class you want to style in your custom CSS is ‘.text-hover-qtip’.
Does this plugin explicitly support any third-party plugins?
Yes. While this plugin is compatible with many other plugins that modify post and widget text, this plugin has explicit built-in support for Advanced Custom Fields and Elementor, which provide additional content areas. This plugin provides hooks that can be used to enable compatibility with other plugins and themes. If you know the name of the filter provided by a plugin, you can add it to the “More filters” setting to have its value processed for text hover.
Why can’t I find or access the plugin’s settings page even though the plugin is activated?
The plugin’s settings page is found at “Settings” -> “Text Hover” in the admin sidebar menu. In order to see that link in the menu and to access the plugin’s settings page to configure the plugin, you must be logged in as an administrator. More specifically, you must be a user with the ‘manage_options’ and ‘unfiltered_html’ capabilities, which by default are capabilities of the ‘administrator’ role. If you have a custom role, or your administrator role has been customized, such that both capabilities are not assigned to you, then you cannot configure the plugin.
Does this plugin include unit tests?
Yes.
Changelog
Recommended hardening release: restricted HTML tags that can be used as hover text in fancy tooltips, added DEVELOPER-DOCS.md, noted compatibility through WP 5.9, and minor settings page and documentation tweaks.
4.2 (2022-03-22)
Highlights:
This release introduces security hardening to restrict HTML tags that can be used as hover text in fancy tooltips, adds DEVELOPER-DOCS.md, notes compatibility through WP 5.9, and minor settings page and documentation tweaks.
Details:
- 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)
Highlights:
This feature release adds a new setting to allow for user-specified filters to be processed, updates the plugin framework significantly, improves the plugin settings page, restructures unit test files, notes compatibility through WP 5.7, and more.
Details:
- 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
styletag - Change: Incorporate commonly defined styling for inline_textarea
- 061:
- Fix bug preventing settings from getting saved
- 060:
- Rename class from
c2c_{PluginName}_Plugin_051toc2c_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_optionsfilter instead of deprecatedwhitelist_optionsfor 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.phpintotests/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/*.phpintotests/phpunit/tests/ - Change: Remove ‘test-‘ prefix from unit test files
- Change: Rename
phpunit.xmltophpunit.xml.distper 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)
Highlights:
This minor release adds a new setting that can allow the plugin to run later to avoid potential conflicts with other plugins, now allows hover strings to begin or end with punctuation, updates its plugin framework, adds a TODO.md file, updates a few URLs to be HTTPS, expands unit testing, and updates compatibility to be WP 4.9-5.4+.
Details:
- 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_priorityfor 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
abbrtag 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
$priorityargument 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
Full changelog is available in CHANGELOG.md.
Screenshots
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FAQ
Text Hover: quick answers
Straight answers, pulled from live WordPress.org data.
Live data from WordPress.org · checked Sep 27, 2026
Is Text Hover free?
Yes. Text Hover is free to download and use from the official WordPress.org plugin directory.
Is Text Hover safe to use in 2026?
Text Hover shows warning signs in 2026 — compare the alternatives below before installing. It runs on 1K+ sites, is rated 4.5/5 and was last updated 5 years ago, and scores 37/100 on our health check.
How many websites use Text Hover?
Text Hover is active on 1K+ WordPress websites and has been downloaded 63,359 times since it launched in July 2009. It was downloaded 202 times in the last 30 days.
Does Text Hover work with WordPress 7.1?
Text Hover is officially tested up to WordPress 5.9.18, while the latest release is 7.1.2. It may still work, but try it on a staging site first.
When was Text Hover last updated?
The latest version, 4.2, was released on March 23, 2022 (5 years ago).
Who makes Text Hover?
Text Hover is developed and maintained by Scott Reilly.
What are the best alternatives to Text Hover?
The most popular alternatives to Text Hover are Abbreviation button for Tin… (100+ installs).
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