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

Category Cloud 1.6 Downloads: 4447 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
$a = "ccloud_smallest=8&ccloud_largest=22&ccloud_order=POP&ccloud_numitem=5";
category_cloud($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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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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