About

jQuery Simple Color is a very simple color-picker plugin that displays a square grid of selectable colors. I found a lot of the other color-picker plugins quite heavy, so I ended up writing this to provide a dead-simple alternative. The list of colors it uses can be customized, and the layout size etc can be configured to a certain extent. jQuery Simple Color is licensed under the MIT license.

Installation

You'll need to download the jQuery library, and include it before jquery.simple-color.js in your HTML source. See the examples folder for examples.

Usage

Simple Color transparently converts regular text input fields into color pickers.

First, add a text element:

<input class='simple_color' value='#cc3333'/>

Simple Color will automatically pick up the value attribute and display it as the default color.

Once you have one or more text elements set up, just use the simpleColor() function to set up the color picker:

$('.simple_color').simpleColor();

You can use any valid jQuery selector instead of '.simple_color' if you wish.

Simple Color also supports various options to customize the color picker:

$('.simple_color').simpleColor({
		cellWidth: 9,
		cellHeight: 9,
		border: '1px solid #333333',
		buttonClass: 'button'
});

Options

defaultColor:       Default (initially selected) color.
                     default value: '#FFF'

border:             CSS border properties.
                     default value: '1px solid #000'

cellWidth:          Width of each individual color cell.
                     default value: 10

cellHeight:         Height of each individual color cell.
                     default value: 10

cellMargin:         Margin of each individual color cell.
                     default value: 1

boxWidth:           Width of the color display box.
                     default value: 115px

boxHeight:          Height of the color display box.
                     default value: 20px

columns:            Number of columns to display. Color order may look 
                    strange if this is altered.
                     default value: 16

insert:             The position to insert the color picker. 'before' or 
                    'after'.
                     default value: 'after'

buttonClass:        A custom CSS class to add to the button, if you want to 
                    add some custom styling.
                     default value: ''

colors:             An array of colors to display, if you want to 
                    customize the default color set.
                     default value: default color set - see 'default_colors' below.

displayColorCode:   Display the color code (eg #333333) as text inside 
                    the button. true or false.
                     default value: false

colorCodeAlign:     Text alignment used to display the color code inside 
                    the button. Only used if 'displayColorCode' is true. 
                    'left', 'center' or 'right'
                     default value: 'center'

colorCodeColor:     Text color of the color code inside the button. Only 
                    used if 'displayColorCode' is true.
                     default value: '#FFF'

Building From Scratch

You can build the regular, un-minified version simply by running ant:

$ ant
Buildfile: build.xml

jquery.simple-color:
     [echo] Building ./jquery.simple-color.js
     [echo] ./jquery.simple-color.js built.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

Before you can build the minified version yourself, you'll need to download the Google Closure Compiler and put it in a folder called build:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ wget http://closure-compiler.googlecode.com/files/compiler-latest.zip
$ unzip compiler-latest.zip

Once you have the compiler, you can build the minified version by running ant min:

$ ant min
Buildfile: build.xml

jquery.simple-color:
     [echo] Building ./jquery.simple-color.js
     [echo] ./jquery.simple-color.js built.

min:
     [echo] Building ./jquery.simple-color.min.js
    [apply] Applied java to 1 file and 0 directories.
   [delete] Deleting: /Users/dave/Documents/Code/jquery/jquery-simple-color/tmpmin
     [echo] ./jquery.simple-color.min.js built.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

Change history

• Version 1.0.1 (2011-08-15) : Trigger change() event when a color is selected (thanks firstclown), and make colored display box clickable to select colors.
• Version 1.0.0 (2011-05-21) : 1.0 release.

Bug Reports

If you come across any problems, please create a ticket and we'll try to get it fixed as soon as possible.

Contributing

Once you've made your commits:

1. Fork jquery-simple-color
2. Create a topic branch - git checkout -b my_branch
3. Push to your branch - git push origin my_branch
4. Create a Pull Request from your branch
5. That's it!

Author

Dave Perrett :: mail@recursive-design.com :: @recurser

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 Dave Perrett. See License for details.