Tag Clouds For WordPress and WordPress MU
Tag Clouds according to Wikipedia: “A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical… Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.”
For a live example of them, take a look at the end of this post and also on the bottom of my sidebar.php.
For a really involved explanation of Tag Clouds, see this article on Understanding Tag Clouds over at joelamantia.com.
Because all the cool kids have Tag Clouds on their blogs, I wanted them too. Because I can’t do anything the easy way, I wanted them on my WordPress MU blog networks.
The Tag Cloud plugin I want to use is Ultimate Tag Warrior 3. Not only is it the widest praised Tag Cloud Plugin, but it has a neato way to plug into Google Sitemaps. I will go into that in greater detail in the future.
Installation of Ultimate Tag Warrior went flawlessly. I did delete the ultimate-tag-warrior-legacy.php and ultimate-tag-warrior-tag-archive.php files to clean up my plugins in WP. I wont be using them so for me, they are clutter. Must say though, nice that they were there. Christine so far earns her title of “rockin”.
I was greeted with a rather daunting and confusing configuration page, but I quickly found the help links at the top of the page. This is a serious plugin with some really good (and amusing) documentation!
You know I like sidebars and warnings right? Here is one now. If you are contemplating adding a Tag Cloud to your blog, do it NOW! I just spent the last couple hours adding the Tag Cloud to just one of my blogs. It will probably be weeks before I go through all the existing posts on this network. What a serious waste of time. Tags get added much faster as you write an article.
As I added my tags to my articles, I noticed that the links created lead to my 404. Since I did actually look at the code, I know this is UTW’s normal way of catching… er… user error. 
I dug in for some quality RTFM time and discovered that this is actually an issue with the new WordPress… I am not going to say anything snide here, sometimes there are reasonable reasons to change things… *cough* been a couple upgrades to WP since this originally came up though and still no fix.
The solution though was not too difficult. Hacks and Gadgets by HCL offered this .htaccess rewrite fix for Ultimate Tag Warrior which squared me right on up. As Christine Davis of UTW pointed out in the comments on her groovy plugin, be sure to put the .htaccess lines above the WordPress lines. Take a look at this example .htaccess file.
If I just lost you in the last paragraph, find your admin and get them to help you out. This is NOT the thing you should play with without a clue.
The really slick part is once I had Ultimate Tag Warrior working on one of my MU sites, I just had to activate and configure the plugin on my other WordPress MU sites and it worked beautifully.
Christine, you earn your title of “rockin”! (:
This plugin went in nicely and the documentation was VERY good by any standard! Even the issue I had was pretty easily taken care of. I found the solution on the index of the plugin page and it worked as stated.
Minor thing, I also applaud rockin’ Christine’s giving props and a link to where the solution was published rather than just copying the solution into her comment. Yeah, it was one more click for me as a user, but I can hardly complain.
It says a lot that the plugin developers and maintainers do a better job than the actual WordPress support channels.
Tags:blog google google sitemaps hacks howto OSS php plugins SEO sidebar wordpress wordpress mu wordpress plugins
No comments yet.