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Sarah Gooding

A Beautiful Way to Display Color Palettes in WordPress

Color palettes are fun way to explore colors for a concept, redesign, decoration ideas or home improvement projects. If you get excited when walking into a paint store, then you understand the small thrill of viewing colors together in coordinated palettes. Many design-oriented sites, such as ColourLovers.com or Design Seeds, are devoted entirely to the concept of creating pleasing color palettes.

Awesome Color Palettes is a new plugin that makes it easy to display color palettes in WordPress content. The plugin allows users to create their own color palettes using a shortcode that passes a list of colors:

[awe_palette colors="434858,5886c5,#f2674a,c6006d"]

The shortcode is not sensitive, so you can include the # or not; it doesn’t affect the output. Multiple shortcodes can be listed on the same post or page and will display as stacked palettes:

colors-in-post

Including palettes in your posts lets you easily discuss color trends or ideas for a project in your article with interactive palettes to illustrate. Mouseover any palette to display its hexadecimal color codes:

colors-mouseover

Check out a live demo of the palette display on the plugin author’s website. You can see how easy it would be to curate your own list of beautiful color combinations.

The plugin’s author includes a template tag if you want to add palettes to your theme. You can also create an awesome-color-palette.php file and add it to your theme folder to create custom palettes for whatever you need.

The palettes can handle up to 10 colors out of the box, but the CSS is very easily to edit, should you wish to include more or desire to change how they are displayed.

Saving your color palettes on a third-party website allows you to share them with other people, but there’s always the chance that you could lose all of your palettes one day if the service goes away. This plugin gives you a way to easily backup all of your palettes to your WordPress site. It also makes color-related discussions on your site more interesting and could easily be used with portfolios. You can download Awesome Color Palettes for free from WordPress.org.

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10 responses to “A Beautiful Way to Display Color Palettes in WordPress”

  3. What a find Sarah! It’s funny, it’s often not the BIG things, but the small ones that can make such a big difference. The improvement in typing Markdown over HTML is pretty small, but when you’re in the WP text editor every day, the speed, convenience, and visual cleanliness of Markdown just makes it easier and faster and I feel better about the whole thing.

    In the case of Awesome Color Palettes, I don’t put out palettes every day. Although I have used ColorLovers.com & design-seeds.com on occasion. In this case I think it might be “fun” as much as “function,” although it is a pretty nice way to drop a hex palette under a logo or other graphic you’re posting somewhere.

    I don’t think this is going to be a plugin that I’ll install everywhere, but with the right crowd, it could be functional and/or a lot of fun. I’m sure you know about Emoj.li, the all emoji social net launching in a few days. I think ACP could be fun on a group blog of designers to post palettes back and forth. Sort of like emoji for the design crowd.

    TY!

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  5. Ouch! At the end of the first line of the above comment I inserted an emoji – when I posted, it deleted the entire rest of my comment! Then I edited and retyped the whole thing, but apparently the 5 minute edit limit kicked in and so it AGAIN deleted my whole comment. :(

    TAKE 3:

    But… with a plugin like WP Inject, Akismet, or lots of others, you receive a service, and if you don’t want it anymore, you simply deactivate, no big deal. But with ACP, you’re dependent on it to make those shortcodes display. If it falls off the update cycle or has a vulnerability or a conflict with another plugin you need – you’re out of luck.

    With this sort of “dependency” plugin, to use it is to be stuck with it for the life of your website. Vs making a .jpg palette which wouldn’t have the fun animation, but which would give you pages that would never break. Some of the Gmaps plugins are similar. They may have features over a pure Gmap embed, but it’s a dependency on that plugin forever. With maps, it’s easy for me, I’ll take the plain Gmap embed. But APC is very cool…

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