Hi,

I guess you all know Wordpress tags cloud plugin Roy Tanck’s WP-Cumulus. I was very excited by its design and wanted to use it on my own SPIP website.

I browsed all the forums or SPIP sites I knew and even Googleised cumulus for several days , but got no result... Sight...

So I decided to try something on my own.

The result is a mixed SPIP, PHP and Javascript piece of code to be inserted in your skeleton and which diplays your keywords as a tags cloud.

You can easily set the Flash movie size, background color, text color and size (but can’t change the police, sorry), tags spinning speed, number of keywords diplayed, the page they are linked to, set the background to transparent.

Of course, there are some limits : it doesn’t take care of keywords groups (I don’t use it...) and doesn’t use clean addresses (I still have a few to understand about these...).

Last but not least, I could test it with my SPIP 1.9.2c version only.

How does it work?

The code starts with building a simple HTML keywords list with their links inside a DIV. Then, thanks to the SWObject script provided [1], it tests the Flash plugin installation and version and, if everything is OK, it replaces the list with the Flash movie inside the DIV. If an incompatibility is detected, or if your visitor has discarded Javascript, the HTML list is displayed instead of the Flash movie.

So no one will either face an empty page or loose the keywords browsing ability!

More, the HTML list code is sent even if not displayed. Because of this, the search engines robots can easily index the linked pages... So the Flash links indexing problem is solved.

Tested using http://browsershots.org, the script is compatible with 98% of browsers, under Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD. It means that either the Flash (95%) or HTML list is diplayed. Nevertheless, Mac OS browsers don’t set the Flash movie because of a Javascript issue, MSIE 4.0 et Opera 7.11 under XP are returning error messages, as well as Konqueror 3.5 under Debian and Dillo 0.89.6 under Ubuntu 7.

I want it!

To see it work, you can go to my website http://www.ph-guillon.com (in french...).

To download the required files, go to this contribution of mine. A commented english version is avaliable for download. (With authors’ autorisation under GNU-GPL or MIT licence )

The code is too long to be exposed here, but avaliable in txt format. No surprise.

I want it, but I want more....

If you want to go further, go to this Roy Tanck’s blog contribution How to repurpose my tag cloud Flash movie where you will see the tags cloud used in the sidebar.

You will also learn that his movie may be fed from a external XML file as well for other purposes.

Don’t go to bed too late...

PaulH