Do you use the new tagging feature of Wordpress 2.3? If so, you’ve probably added the Tag Cloud Widget, and you’ve probably also noticed that the formatting is horrible.

365 To Freedom is a new site, and I’ve added tags to every post since I started. However, until yesterday, I did not use the tag cloud widget because of how bad it looked.

Fortunately, someone came along and made a better one!

Keith from Reciprocity has created the Wordpress 2.3 Configurable Tag Cloud Widget. As the name would suggest, it works with the new tagging features of WP 2.3, so if you’re using an earlier version of Wordpress, you’re out of luck on this one. However, you don’t need to have a widget ready theme in order to use this (as the name wouldn’t suggest).

Take a look at the difference it’s made for me…

With Wordpress’ default widget (on the left) I had no control over the size, color, or order of the tags. Using the new one, I have greater control over all of these factors.

Here are all of the options available with this new widget…

As you can see, I chose to use lighter colors & smaller font size for the less-often used tags, and darker colors & bigger font size for the frequently used ones. It seems to do a decent job handling gradients on its own, as there are clearly more than two shades of green in my tag cloud.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

What do you think? Is it working for you? Do use even use the new tagging feature? Why or why not?

Tags: plugin, tag cloud, widget

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.