Hugh

Hugh is a social color experiment for WordPress. Add the Hugh widget to any sidebar and visitors to your site can pick a color — background, text, the whole page — and broadcast it to everyone else viewing the site at the same time.

How it works:

• A visitor opens the color picker in the Hugh widget, chooses a hex color, and optionally leaves a short note.

• Hugh pushes that color via the REST API and stores it (up to 100 recent entries).

• The page background and text color transition smoothly to the new color for all active visitors.

• A row of color swatches shows the history of recent choices — click any swatch to jump back to that color.

It’s part toy, part social experiment: can your visitors agree on a color, or will it descend into a color battle?

Technical details:

• Colors are stored via the WP object cache when an external cache (Memcached, Redis) is available, making it fast and ephemeral. Without an external cache it falls back to a WP option for persistence.

• Color history is capped at 100 entries, sorted by timestamp.

• REST endpoints at hugh/v1/colors (GET) and hugh/v1/colors/add (POST) are public and unauthenticated by design — this is intentional for the live-sharing mechanic.

• The hugh_css filter lets themes register custom CSS overrides. Twenty Seventeen support is built in; other themes can hook in via add_filter( 'hugh_css',... ).

• Colors are rendered as smooth CSS transitions so the page doesn’t flash when a new color arrives.

Note: Hugh works best on sites with an external object cache. Without one, colors are persisted to the database and shared state may lag under concurrent visitors.