Category Cloud 1.6 – WordPress Plugin

Category Cloud 1.6 is the latest release of Category Cloud, a wordpress plugin that shows categories as a colored tag cloud. You can see it in the sidebar at www.mapelli.info.

New Features

• Option to display only subcategories of given categories
• Option to include specific categories
• Option to show post count near each category
• Automatic Search for updates (weekly)
• Fixed sorting bug
• Minor bug fixing

V 1.5 Features

• before and after tags
• categories can be sort by ascending or descending number of posts
• option to show a fixed number of categories (this way you can do a “top 10 categories”)
• colored cloud, with colors based on the importance of each category

v 1.0 Features

• Support for WordPress 2.1 (does not work with previous versions, sorry!)
• 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

Installing Category Cloud Plugin

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 if (function_exists('category_cloud')) 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

Upgrading Category Cloud Plugin

1. Get Category Cloud zip file & Unzip it
2. Upload category-cloud.php to your wordpress plugin directory, overwriting the previous version
3. Play with the new options (Options ->Category Cloud in the wordpress administration) to fit your needs. Options from previous version will be lost.
4. Upgrade your css, if you need to:

Get Category Cloud

Customization

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

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

also, you can use the before and after fields in the option page to add further customization, e.g. by adding <span> or <li> tags before and after each category, and use css to restyle them.

Tips

You can add “additional” tag clouds in a page by calling the category_cloud() function with a parameter, for example you can show the top 5 categories with

<?php
$a = "ccloud_smallest=8&ccloud_largest=22&ccloud_order=POP&ccloud_numitem=5";
category_cloud($a);
?>

here are the valid variables you can use and what they means:

• ccloud_smallest is the smallest font size in the resulting tag cloud
• ccloud_largest is the largest font size in the resulting tag cloud
• ccloud_unit is the unit that it’s used for the font, can be one of
  • px
  • pt
  • em
• ccloud_exclude is a list of the excluded categories IDs, something like “1, 3, 15″, or you can use ALL to exclude all the categories
• ccloud_include is a list of the categories to include, something like “1, 3, 5″
• ccloud_subof is a list of the categories to search for subcategories to include. e.g. using “15, 3″ will display a tag cloud with the subcategories of category 15 and 3
• ccloud_showcount displays or hides the number of posts in each category. Valid values are
  • true
    show the post count
  • false
    hide the post count
• ccloud_order is the order of the tags in the resulting tag cloud, can be one of
  • ASC
    sort by name, ascending
  • DESC
    sort by name, descending
  • random
    random order
  • POP
    sort by popularity, descending
  • UNPOP
    sort by popularity, ascending
• ccloud_mincount is the minimum number of posts a category must have to appear in the resulting tag cloud
• ccloud_numelements the number of categories to show
• ccloud_before what to put before each category
• ccloud_after what to put after each category
• ccloud_startcol the color for the categories with less posts
• ccloud_endcol the color for the categories with more posts

Comments and Feedback

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