A 3D Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress: WP Cumulus
Translated from Chinese by Claude. Read the original
I think this has to be the coolest tag cloud effect I’ve ever seen: a super flashy WordPress tag cloud built with Flash+JS. I only found it while aimlessly browsing, clicking one link after another until I ended up there. Turns out something like this exists, and it’s well worth recommending. What does it look like? Check out my sidebar. Best of all, the version I’m using fully supports Chinese!
Main features of the WP Cumulus ****WordPress plugin:
- The cloud can contain tags or categories, or both.
- Supports widgets and custom template code.
- Doesn’t affect search engine crawling. The tag cloud it generates is only displayed visually as 3D Flash, but the source code it produces is the same as WordPress’s default tag cloud. If you don’t have Adobe Flash Player ActiveX installed, it just shows up as an ordinary tag list.
How to use the WP Cumulus WordPress plugin:
- Upload and activate it.
- Click Appearance, then Widgets. A list of available widgets will appear; pick WP-Cumulus from it.
- Drag WP-Cumulus into the sidebar next to it and configure it.
Since the settings screen can’t be translated into Chinese (a character encoding problem), I can only give translations of the English here. Width and height set the size it’s displayed at in the sidebar
Tag color, second color, highlight color, background color, and whether the background is transparent: just set these to match your theme!
Rotation speed. This version of WP-Cumulus has been modified, so it doesn’t have the jittery rotation some versions of WP-Cumulus floating around online have. It spins very smoothly
Whether the tags are spread evenly over the sphere: change this to suit your situation~
Tags, categories, or both: where the displayed items come from. Set this one to suit your situation too~
The last option takes wp_tag_cloud parameters, which let you set things like how many tags the cloud shows and the largest and smallest font sizes. Of course some parameters can’t take effect, such as orderby, order and so on
The effect WP Cumulus creates really is great. Put a Flash tag cloud like this on your blog and it’s guaranteed to catch visitors’ eyes. Best of all, WP-Cumulus only loads a 7KB swf, so it definitely won’t slow down your page load! Beauty and speed? A perfect match! After all that, here’s the WP-Cumulus download link, hosted on 115 cloud storage: Download WP-Cumulus