Installation Instructions

Installation

1. Make sure you're running WordPress version 2.3 or better. It won't work with older versions.
2. Download the zip file and extract the contents.
3. Upload the 'wp-cumulus' folder to your plugins directory (wp-content/plugins/).
4. Activate the plugin through the 'plugins' page in WP.
5. See 'Options->WP Cumulus' to adjust things like display size, etc...

In order to actually display the tag cloud, you have three options.

1. Create a page or post and type [wp-cumulus] anywhere in the content. This 'tag' will be replaced by the flash movie when viewing the page. See here for more info.
2. Add the following code anywhere in your theme to display the cloud. <?php wp_cumulus_insert(); ?> This can be used to add WP Cumulus to your sidebar, although it may not actually be wide enough in many cases to keep the tags readable.
3. The plugin adds a widget, so you can place it on your sidebar through 'Appearance'->'Widgets'. Open the widget to access it's own set of settings (background color, size, etc).

FAQ

My theme/site appears not to like this plugin. It's not displaying correctly.

There are a number of things that may prevent WP-Cumulus from displaying or cause it to display a short message about how it needs the Flash plugin.

• In 99% of all cases where this happens the issue is caused by markup errors in the page where the plugin is used. Please validate your blog using validator.w3.org and fix any errors you may encounter.
• Older versions had issues with PHP 5.2 (or better). This has been fixed, so please upgrade to the latest version.
• The plugin requires Flash Player 9 or better and javascript. Please make sure you have both.
• There have been some cases where WordPress' Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature breaks the plugin. After upgrading the plugin the Flash movie file would be corrupt for some users. If this happens to you, please try disabling and reinstalling the plugin (through FTP).
• Please try using the 'compatibility mode' if you're using version 1.20 or better. Although it's better to fix whatever is causing the issues with the normal mode, this can be used as a workaround solution.

Hey, but what about SEO?

I'm not sure how beneficial tag clouds are when it comes to SEO, but just in case WP Cumulus outputs the regular tag cloud (and/or categories listing) for non-flash users. This means that search engines will see the same links. They're hidden through CSS by default, but there's an options to make them visible.

I'd like to change something in the Flash movie, will you release the .fla?

As of version 1.12 the source code is available from wordpress.org under the GPL license. Click "other versions" and get the developer version.

Some of my tags occasionally hit the sides of the movie and are cropped

If this happens you should change the aspect for the movie to make it wider. This can be done by increasing the width, but also by decreasing the height. Both will make the movie 'more landscape' giving long tags more room.

Some characters are not showing up

Because of the way Flash handles text, only Latin characters are supported in the current version. This is due to a limitation where in order to be able to animate text fields smoothly the glyphs need to be embedded in the movie. The Flash movie's source code is available for download through Subversion. Doing so will allow you to create a version for your language. There's a text field in the root of the movie that you can use to embed more characters. If you change to another font, you'll need to edit the Tag class as well.

More info here.

When I click on tags, nothing happens.

This is usually caused by a Flash security feature that affects movies served from another domain as the surrounding page. If your blog is http://yourblog.com, but you have http://www.yourblog.com listed as the 'WordPress address' under Settings -> General this issue can occur. In this case you should adjust this setting to match your blog's actual URL. If you haven't already, I recommend you decide on a single URL for your blog and redirect visitors using other options. This will increase your search engine ranking and in the process help solve this issue :).

I'm not using WordPress...

• Steve Springett has ported this to Movable Type. More info over on his site.
• Michael Robinson has ported WP-Cumulus to RapidWeaver, see his tutorial here.
• Amanda Fazani managed to get Cumulus working on Blogger. More info on Blogumus here.
• Yannick Lejeune has done a TypePad version based in part on Steve's work.
• Christian Philipp's created a TYPO3 version.
• Rob Antonishen did a Serendipity version (search for serendipity_event_freetag).
• Big Bear maintains the Joomla version.
• Pratul Kalia and Björn Jacob have ported it to Drupal.
• Ryan Tomlinson has a BlogEngine.NET version.
• Colin Seymour has created a Habari version.
• Andreas Scherer uses DasBlog.
• Jean-Yves Zinsou did an eZ version.
• Simple Tags, an Expression Engien addon can now display tags using Cumulus. Thanks Oliver Heine.
• Catchpen ported Cumulus to Social Web CMS.
• Domi create a PHP-Fusion port.
• Bysoft did a Magento version.
• Benjamin Anseaume created a Sweetcron version.
• I wrote this post on how to use the flash movie in other contexts.

This list is far from complete. Chances are you'll find the port you need through search engines. If you're having trouble setting it up, please contact the author(s) of the port.

Changelog

1.23

• Patches a potential XSS vulnerability (thanks to MustLive for alerting me to this).
• Updates the credits to reflact that WP-Cumulus is now a team effort.
• Implements the new changelog standard in the readme file.

1.22

• Fixes some minor HTML issues in the 'compatibility mode'.
• Patches a potential XSS vulnerability (thanks to Thomas Scholz for alerting me to this).

1.21

• Adds an option to show the regular tag cloud to non-flash users (used to be hidden through CSS).
• The widget title is now optional.
• Adds support for 'target' attribute to the Flash movie.
• XML path can now be set through a flashvar.
• Fixed markup errors in the compatibility mode.
• Several minor fixes.

1.20

• Adds a 'compatibility mode' which uses a simpler, non-javascript, way of embedding the Flash.
• Adds proper shortcode support (See here for more info)
• Adds Turkish language support to the Flash movie.
• Improves the plugin's default settings.

1.19

• Fixed the mouse pointer not changing to a hand when hovering tags.
• Flash code cleanup

1.18

• Adds the ability to override individual tag colors when using the movie outside of WordPress (since WordPress has no color setting for tags).
• Improves mouse detection in transparent mode
• Fixes a bug affecting blogs with the admin using https.

1.17

• Fixes an issue with localized style sheet point sizes (e.g. 9,55pt instead of 9.55pt)
• Adds an optional highlight color setting

1.16

• Fixes an issue with categories being rendered black when all of them have the same number of posts.
• Reduces the default font size (from the biggest possible to "medium") in that same situation.
• Significantly reduces CPU load when the cloud isn't moving.

1.15

• Adds the possibility to create a multi-colored tag cloud by entering a second tag color.

1.14

• Fixes an issue where no tags are displayed when viewing the movie locally in MSIE.
• Fixes an issue where one random tag would not be displayed.

1.13

• No longer breaks when the wp-content folder is moved to a non-standard location.

1.12

• First version hosted on WordPress.org, and released under GPL license.
• Uses the Arial font to avoid font licensing issues.

1.11

• Restores an earlier fix for IE to force loading of the Flash movie.

1.1

• Complete rewrite of the Flash movie (Actionscript 3, requires Flash Player 9 or better).
• Better mouse detection.
• Adds option to distribute the tags evenly over the sphere.
• Adds support for categories.
• Adds the ability to pass parameters to the WordPress wp_tag_cloud function.
• Several smaller enhancements.

1.05

• Fixes several issues with IE, including an issue where it was impossible to use the regular version and the widget on the same page. Thanks to Fadi for alerting me to these.

1.04

• Fixes the 'it kills my blog' error for people using PHP 5.2 or newer. Thanks to Mujahid for helping me debug this.
• Speed improvements in the Flash code.

1.03

• Removes the wp_head hook in yet another attempt to fix issues with some other plugins and themes.
• Reduces system overhead by storing less options.
• Adds setting for speed.
• Adds a widget with seperate options (size, colors, speeds, etc).
• Attemps to detect when the mouse leaves the movie, reducing the 'spinning, but not out of control' effect.
• Several minor fixes.

1.02

• Fixes issues with sites not loading after activation, reduces server load and fixes lost spaces in tags. Thanks to Dimitry for helping me debug these issues.

1.01

• Fixes an issue where the cloud would spin out of control when the browsers loses focus on OSX.

1.00

• Initial release version.