WordPress Admin Form Controls

Four small widgets that ship with every WP install and that plugin developers reach for daily — but rarely enqueue correctly. This skill is the recipe sheet.

When to use this skill

Trigger when ANY of the following is true:

• A plugin admin field needs a color picker, a date picker, a typeahead/autocomplete, or a first-run tooltip on a new feature.
• Code references wp-color-picker, wpColorPicker, iris, jquery-ui-datepicker, jquery-ui-autocomplete, wp-pointer, or $('#x').pointer().
• The user is about to bundle their own color picker (Pickr, color.js, Coloris) or date picker (flatpickr, Pikaday) when core's would do.
• The user complains "the datepicker has no CSS" / "wpColorPicker is not a function".

Color picker — wp-color-picker

Script handle wp-color-picker depends on iris (the underlying picker — Automattic's color library, wp-includes/js/iris.min.js, registered at wp-includes/script-loader.php:1502). The stylesheet wp-color-picker is also registered; you must enqueue it as well.

Enqueue