Category Cloud 1.5 is a wordpress plugin that shows categories as a colored 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

New 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 (should work on older wordpress 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

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 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
  4. Upgrade your css, if you need to: now categories are enclosed in a <div id="category_cloud">...</div> tag.

Get Category Cloud

Category Cloud 1.5 Downloads: 1128 times

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
$a = "smallest=8&largest=22&order=POP&numitem=5";
category_cloud($a);
?>

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
      sort by name, ascending
    • DESC
      sort by name, descending
    • random
      random order
    • POP
      sort by popularity, descending
    • UNPOP
      sort by popularity, ascending
  • mincount is the minimum number of posts a category must have to appear in the resulting tag cloud
  • numelements the number of categories to show
  • before what to put before each category
  • after what to put after each category
  • startcol the color for the categories with less posts
  • endcol the color for the categories with more posts

Comments and Feedback

I love them, so please don’t be shy and write something down here! :)
Also, if you write a comment and leave the “notify me of followup comments via e-mail” option checked, you will be mailed when bugs, feature requests or new versions are posted.

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