Category cloud is a wordpress plugin that shows categories as a tag cloud. You can see it in the sidebar at www.mapelli.info.

This is not the latest version! you may be intrested in the latest version of category cloud

Since the plugin I used before (weighted categories) does not support WordPress 2.1, I decided to develop Category Cloud on top of it and to add some useful features and a option page

Features

  • Support for WordPress 2.1 (should work on older versions, but it’s not tested, I’ll be happy to have some feedbacks)
  • Customizable max and min font size and unit (px, pt, em)
  • Categories shown in ascending, descending or random order
  • Possibility to exclude given categories
  • Possibility to exclude categories with less than a given number of posts
  • Full integration with wordpress administration panel

Installation Instructions

  1. Get Category Cloud zip file & Unzip it
  2. Upload category-cloud.php to your wordpress plugin directory
  3. Activate the plugin from the plugins tab
  4. Insert <?php category_cloud();?> where you want your category cloud to appear
  5. Play with the options (Options ->Category Cloud in the wordpress administration) to fit your needs

Get Category Cloud

Category Cloud 1.0 Downloads: 2411 times

Customization

Category Cloud can be customized via a style sheet, adding a categories entry.
Here’s mine:

#categories {
margin-left:20px;
margin-right:5px;
padding: 0px;
text-align: justify;
line-height: auto;
}

Tips

You can add “additional” tag clouds in a page by calling the category_cloud() function with a parameter, for example

<?php
$a = "smallest=8&largest=22&mincount=3&order=ASC";
category_cloud($);
?>

here are the valid variables and what they means:

  • smallest is the smallest font size in the resulting tag cloud
  • largest is the largest font size in the resulting tag cloud
  • unit is the unit that it’s used for the font, can be one of
    • px
    • pt
    • em
  • exclude is a list of the excluded categories IDs, something like “1, 3, 15″
  • order is the order of the tags in the resulting tag cloud, can be one of
    • ASC
    • DESC
    • random
  • mincount is the minimum number of posts a category must have to appear in the resulting tag cloud

Comments and Feedback

I love them, so please don’t be shy and write something down here! :)

francesco mapelli