How to repurpose my tag cloud Flash movie
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Many people have asked my whether they can use the Flash movie in their own projects, and how to go about it. Well, here’s how.
When you download the plugin you’ll find it consists of three files. The first, wp-cumulus.php is the actual WordPress plugin. It hooks into WordPress, adds the options panel to the backend, and replaces the WP-CUMULUS tag with the Flash movie. You’ll also find SWFObject, which is used to embed the Flash movie into your page (future version might not use this, as it appears to cause problems for some people).
If you’re looking to repurpose the Flash movie, all you’ll need is the ‘tagcloud.swf’ file. Here’s what you’ll need to know in order to use it.
- The movie requires Flash Player 9 or better.
- It contains only Latin characters. This short tutorial guides you though the process of adding support for your language.
- The movie is set to fill the available Stage size but keep it’s aspect ratio (Flash’s default scaling behavior). It is square, so if you embed it at 800*500 the sphere will be exactly the same size as when you embed at 500*800. With 150px of empty space on two sides.
- Landscape aspect ratios work best because text is oriented horizontally.
Flashvars
The movie gets the tags information through ‘flashvars’. See here for more info on flashvars. SWFObject implements flashvars a little differently (see here). The actionscript code inside the movie looks for the flashvars in the root timeline, so if you’re planning on loading the movie inside another Flash movie, just pass the vars to that movie.
The flashvar used to pass the tags info is called “tagcloud”, and contains XML data describing the tags. If it is not passed the movie will look for a file called “tagcloud.xml” in the current path and parse that instead. This was used for testing, but might also prove useful if you’re using the movie outside WordPress.
The XML layout used is:
<tags>
<a href="http://www.roytanck.com/tag1" style="font-size:9pt;" >Tag name<a>
<a href="http://www.roytanck.com/tag2" target="_blank" style="font-size:12pt;" >Tag two<a>
...
</tags>
The other attributes used in WordPress’ default tag cloud output are not used. The style attribute is searched for numbers using a very crude mechanism. You can simply use
style="12.4"
In order to set the font size to 12.4.
To prevent problems with character encoding, the WordPress plugin passes the tags urlencoded, but your project might not need this. It should work either way.
Here’s a list of currently available flashvars:
| Name | Format | Description |
|---|---|---|
| mode | String: tags|cats|both | Tells the movie to expect and display tags, categories or both. |
| distr | String: true|false | If set to true, the tags are distributed evenly over the sphere’s surface. |
| tcolor | Hex color value: 0xff0000 for red. | The default tag color |
| tcolor2 | Hex color value | Second tag color. If supplied, tags will get a color from a gradient between both colors based on their popularity. |
| hicolor | Hex color value | Tag mouseover/hover color |
| tspeed | Number: percentage | Determines the speed of the sphere’s rotation. The default is 100, higher numbers increase the speed. |
| tagcloud | XML string (urlencoding optional) | The tag cloud, XML format described above. |
| xmlpath | Path to load the XML from | URL, defaults to ‘tagcloud.xml’ |
Per-tag colors
As of version 1.18 you can override the global tag color settings by adding two optional arguments to the tag cloud XML. The ‘color’ and ‘hicolor’ attributes let you control the tags default and hover colors.
<a href="http://www.roytanck.com/tag1" style="font-size:9pt;" color="0xff0000" hicolor="0xffcc00" >Tag name<a>
Example
The following will render a tag cloud with two red tags and a transparent background at 600 by 400 pixels. As always with SWFObject, it will replace a div (here called ‘flashcontent’) in your page. This is the Javascript part only.
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("tagcloud.swf", "tagcloud", "600", "400", "7", "#336699");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addVariable("mode", "tags");
so.addVariable("distr", "true");
so.addVariable("tcolor", "0xff0000");
so.addVariable("hicolor", "0x000000");
so.addVariable("tagcloud", "<tags><a href='http://www.roytanck.com/tag1' style='9'>Tag name</a><a href='http://www.roytanck.com/tag2' style='12'>Tag two</a></tags>");
so.write("flashcontent");
</script>
Download (updated!) example files here (38kB).
That’s all there is to it. Of course, this movie was created to fit the needs of the WP-Cumulus plugin. Chances are the way scaling is handled (for instance) does not fit your needs. If this is the case, feel free to contact me about possibly whipping up a custom version.
now is the era of flash why would somebody block it from browser?
Bonus totally insightful, for this opinion.
Infinitely appreciate your input! I like and I’m sure do a good job. We...
Thanks for your input to this site! I love and I think you make a good job....
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http://www.roytanck.com/tag/re ladcms/ Sorry, no ReladCMS, ReloadCMS
my E-mail id:-desai.lalu1@gmail.com my password resat maro
Hi Roy, I tried this, I put the swf file in the same root as the html and the script after a div called flashcontent but it doesn’t work at all. Any suggestion? Thanks
Comment by Stefano — May 22, 2008 @ 11:20 am
Hi Stefano. Did you include swfobject.js in your project and include it in your HTML file? If so, what do you see when you load the page? you can check using your right mouse click to check if the plugin loads or not.
Comment by Roy — May 22, 2008 @ 11:23 am
Yes, I did.
I changed the background color so I’m sure that the swf object is loaded in my page, but tags don’t work. When I add the line so.addVariable(”tagcloud” everything stop working.
Comment by Stefano — May 22, 2008 @ 12:17 pm
Hi same is here, pls suggest wht should we do next!
Comment by san — May 22, 2008 @ 4:48 pm
There was a rather silly error in the XML markup in both examples shown above. I fixed it, and Stefano’s project now works. So please use the XML structure shown above. Sorry about this.
Comment by Roy — May 22, 2008 @ 7:26 pm
I’ve set it up on my site.
In so.addVariable(”tagcloud”, “Tag nameTag two“);
use ‘ instead of ” in the anchors.
I’ll be writing a tutorial on how to embed this wonderful … thing into Rapidweaver blogs a little later on.
Mike
Comment by Michael Robinson — June 10, 2008 @ 7:35 am
Versions for other popular CMS’ would be awesome. Let me be the first to suggest Joomla! (at least on this page).
Looks like most of the hard work is already done in the Flash file, so you’d just have to figure out how to make the CMS plugin interface/package/whatnot.
Comment by Jason — June 12, 2008 @ 3:22 am
hello this is a great plugin !!
good work
Is there any way that will work with non latin characters?
I tried with greek UTF-8 and the words do not appear
Thanks Ioannis
Comment by Ioannis — June 23, 2008 @ 11:10 pm
Hi Loannis. I’ve done special languages for other character sets. These are on the plugin’s release page. There currently isn’t a greek one. I’ll see if I can do something about that when I release the next version.
Comment by Roy — June 24, 2008 @ 3:56 pm
Hi Roy
That would be great
if any help needed for testing…
you have my mail
Thanks Ioannis
Comment by Ioannis — June 24, 2008 @ 10:16 pm
Hi Roy, Great version of Tag Cloud… I really like it…. I’m not a WP user so I am using the stand alone version…. I’m a Drupal user and would love to see this work as a Drupal module. In the meantime, you’ve made it possible for me to use it as is….
The enhancement I’d love is the ability to have more color choices to use on certain words to make them stand out.
Again Thanks!
- MaineBOB
Comment by Bob OConnor — July 21, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
Hi Roy,
wow stunning thing, i just included it in our website without WP. I used the example file as a template. It all works now, but i wonder if there is any way to allocate the links evenly around the sphere as seen in the WP-Version !? That is not the case in the example.
Greetings
Michael
Comment by Michael Strauss — August 21, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
Hi Michael. The info above is a little out of date, but if you get the latest version of the flash movie, you should be able to add
widget_so.addVariable(”distr”, “true”);
to your SWFObject code. I haven’t tested this though… and be sure to change the required Flash version to 9 (from 7).
Comment by Roy — August 21, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
Thank you for your fast response. Where do i get the latest version? i can just find the WP cloud…
Comment by Michael Strauss — August 21, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
It’s included in the WordPress plugin download. You can’t miss it. It’s the only SWF in the zip.
Comment by Roy — August 21, 2008 @ 3:43 pm
hmmm the new tagcloud.swf does’nt work well. As soon as i replaced the “old” one it shows only the background, the cloud as such isn’t shown. The line you posted me above makes the whole thing to not display.
I am completly out of ideas now…^^
Comment by Michael Strauss — August 21, 2008 @ 3:59 pm
@Michael: It seems WordPress is messing with the quote characters in my comment above. I just copied the latest flash into the example folder, and added the line in my comment. I then had to change the fancy double quotes WordPress inserted back into regular ones, and remove “widget_”, because the object in the example is “so”. It worked for me, with the tags placed evenly.
I’ll try to update this post asap, but you can email me for the files if you like.
Comment by Roy — August 21, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
ok i’ll try this out as soon as i have time for it. thank you very much for your efforts!^^
Comment by Michael Strauss — August 25, 2008 @ 8:25 am
This is a truly beautiful solution for displaying blog tags! Using these hints, I managed to port the plugin for use with Blogger. I have emailed you about this, and with permission I hope to write about my method for other Blogger users too.
Thank you sincerely for your hard work!
Comment by Amanda Fazani — August 27, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
hey roy can u please tell how can i use this pluggin succesfully in blogger??
Comment by sam — August 29, 2008 @ 7:55 am
Hi Sam. No I can’t. I haven’t used Blogger in over five years. Amanda (see the comment above yours) may be able to help you though… she’s working on a tutorial about using cumulus on Blogger
Comment by Roy — August 29, 2008 @ 10:13 am
Hi, i’m using the example (without the xml file) and the tags are not displayed.
When I add the file tagcloud.xml, the tags in the file are displayed.
It seems that the swf always looks for the tagcloud.xml file.
Is there a solution about that ?
Thanks a lot!
Comment by Rindra — September 3, 2008 @ 10:14 am
Hmmm… it appears the problem exists only in IE. I’ll have to look into this. It probably isn’t the Flash movie’s fault, because in Firefox (and in Chrome
) it works flawlessly.
Comment by Roy — September 3, 2008 @ 12:12 pm
I’ve already try with Firefox and IE but I have the same result.
Perhaps, there’s something wrong in my code here.
Could you check if it’s so.
thanks again.
This will be shown to users with no Flash or Javascript.
var so = new SWFObject(”tagcloud.swf”, “tagcloud”, “600″, “400″, “9″, “#336699″);
//so.addParam(”wmode”, “transparent”);
so.addParam(”mode”, “tags”);
so.addParam(”distr”, “false”);
so.addVariable(”tagcloud”, “Tag name“);
so.addVariable(”tcolor”, “0xff0000″);
so.write(”flashcontent”);
Comment by Rindra — September 3, 2008 @ 4:11 pm
Hi Rindra. The only thing I can see wrong with your code is that there needs to be a node around the tags. I do not have the time to look into the issue right now, but will try to update this asap.
Comment by Roy — September 3, 2008 @ 5:46 pm
I’ve investigated a little further, and it looks like the example does not work properly in an IETab (using the IETab plugin for Firefox). On my machine it does work in IE7.
Comment by Roy — September 9, 2008 @ 8:40 am
hi Roy
any news with the unicode support
& greek UTF-8.
thanks ioannis
Comment by Ioannis — September 9, 2008 @ 9:18 am
Hi Ioannis. I made the plugin open source so you can add whichever characters you need for your language. It’s not possible for me to do versions for all languages, so I made the source code for the movie available, and wrote a short tutorial: http://www.roytanck.com/2008/08/04/how-to-add-more-characters-to-wp-cumulus/ .
Comment by Roy — September 9, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
Hmm, The code looks strangely familiar to some other flash file i saw, If i remember correctly it was called ‘3D Text’ and it is up on various flash sites. Any chance of mentioning/thanking them?
Comment by 3dguy — September 11, 2008 @ 5:37 pm
Is it possible to use this flash tag cloud for Del.icio.us?
When I stumbled upon your awesome tag cloud, I couldn’t help but be transfixed by its simple yet magestic beauty. Then I thought, this would be great if I could apply it to my Del.icio.us account tags..
Does anyone else like this idea?
Comment by Greg — September 11, 2008 @ 10:40 pm
Hello roy,
I would use your tagcloud on Myspace platform but It seems not working because Myspace doesn’t use javascript language. Have you an idee to soluce my prob ?
Thx a lot.
Comment by romk — September 13, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
Hi Romk. There are ways to embed flash into a page that do not require javascript. See here for more info: http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/04/17/embed-flash-or-die-trying/ . You’ll have to add the appropriate flashvars to get the movie functioning properly.
Comment by Roy — September 13, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
Hi Roy.
I’d love to be able to use this on my website. I’ve downloaded the example and it runs very well, except that nothing happens when I click on a word in the cloud. The word is marked with a border but I am not redirected to the href within the anchor tag. I am using IE7 and flash player activex 9.0.124.
Can you help or offer any suggestions?
Thanks.
David
Comment by DavidW — September 16, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
Hi David. You may be bumping into Flash’s security features. Have you uploaded your version to a web server and made sure the domain for the movie and the links are identical?
Comment by Roy — September 17, 2008 @ 10:53 am
@3dguy: Except for some snippets of 3D code I copied from a tutorial years ago, and have been using since, this entire project is homebrew. Do you have an url for the ‘3D text’ project you mentioned?
Comment by Roy — September 17, 2008 @ 1:33 pm
Hi Roy
Awesome plug-in and very intuitive.
Just a note on David’s comment – I had the same issue in that hyperlinks would show in the cloud but the links would go no where when clicked (ie6, ie7, Firefox and Chrome).
I resolved it by removing moving the http:// from the href in the tagcloud.xml and just putting the file name eg href=”test.html” – it then took the root and added test.html to the path.
Hope this is useful
Steve
Comment by Steve G — September 17, 2008 @ 6:57 pm
Hi
Update – whilst the above suggestion works I think Roys comments about Flash security stopping the hyperlinks from working are correct – I have just set up a test web server with same domain for the movie and links and the full http://.. href links now work fine.
Steve
Comment by Steve G — September 17, 2008 @ 8:37 pm
Hi Roy
I read the instructions how to change the character set
Unfortunately i do not have flash
SO if you could make a UTF-8 version it would cover most people with non
latin characters
Thanks again for a wonderfull plugin
Ioannis
Comment by Ioannis — September 18, 2008 @ 10:50 am
@Ionannis: A utf-8 version is technically impossible due to limitations in the Flash player and file size restrictions.
Comment by Roy — September 19, 2008 @ 7:05 am
Hi Roy,
Great tag cloud. Love it!
I have used it as a standalone visualisation tool (www.tweet3d.com) and would like all links to open in a new window/tab. Is there a way to be able to do this?
Many thanks
Edward
Comment by Edward Terry — September 24, 2008 @ 8:50 pm
I’m putting the code on the template to appear in 2 places, I’m putting at the top and at the bottom, but it only shows the top one…
the bottom one, says that i don’t have flash installed :/
Can you make it, so that i can have two on the theme?
Comment by ORiOn — September 26, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
hmm,
What if we have an href like this : http://www.mysite.com/index.php?id=1&cat=12
Then what
?
It wont accept the “&” sign or the &
Any ideas ?
Comment by Sandbird — October 1, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Hi Sandbird. The WordPress implementation uses urlencoding to avoid this. You can simply urlencode the entire tag cloud and feel the resulting string to the Flash movie.
Comment by Roy — October 1, 2008 @ 1:46 pm
Hi Roy, is there any way to use this pulling tags from Wordpress but to display on a non Wordpress page?
Comment by tom — October 24, 2008 @ 10:38 am
Hi Tom, There probably is. You could query WordPress’s database from any PHP file. It might even be possible to include WP’s core functionality into a PHP page you write by including the right files. The codex (codex.wordpress.org) should be able to get you started.
Comment by Roy — October 24, 2008 @ 12:15 pm
Hi Roy!
Thanks for a great bit of code.
I wanted to let you know I have added it to the Serendipity Blog Engine http://www.s9y.org
There is a demo running at my site.
Thanks for the clear example!
-Rob A>
Comment by Rob A — October 24, 2008 @ 2:20 pm
Is there a way to specify a frame destination for the cloud’s links ?
For example, in the xml file :
Yahoo
Thanks
Comment by franck — October 31, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
I re write my question coz the link has been activated.
For example :
a href=”http://www.yahoo.com” class=”tag-link-66″ title=”2 topics” rel=”tag” style=”font-size: 19.55556pt;” target=”bas”>yahoo
Comment by franck — October 31, 2008 @ 11:33 pm
Hi everyone.
I can’t use two clouds. How can I do this?
Comment by Durbek — November 1, 2008 @ 4:47 am
Roy,
I’m trying to send url parms but it appears to be choking on the &, any suggestions? I want to use the “cloud text links” as normal links to call pages with parms.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
…
Comment by Webspeeder — November 12, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
Hi Webspeeder. You’ll either need to use urlencoded &’s or urlencode the entire tag cloud (which is what the WordPress plugin does).
Comment by Roy — November 13, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Hi there,
When trying to add a javascript-link in the href, and testing it afterwards, this doesn’t work. I am using thickbox to open an url (cf. javascript:tb_show(”, ‘http://www.yahoo.com?tbshow=…’);)
Any ideas how to solve this?
Comment by Kosmicc — November 20, 2008 @ 9:26 am
Hi ! Great Work !
I would like to have the tagcloud.swf in 380px x 80 px size…
Is it possible ?
i can’t open the .fla because my version of flash is older
many thanks !
Comment by Charline — November 20, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
@Kosmicc: You could try urlencoding the links or in fact the entire tag cloud.
@Charline: The Flash movie adjusts itself to whatever dimensions you give it in the embed code, but 80px is very small. I don’t think you’ll be able to read smaller tags.
Comment by Roy — November 20, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
I love this tagcloud and have been tryin to figure out exactly what I need to do to install it on my non WP site.
I’m using a PHPbb based portal called IntegraModm and there are no manuals listed here on how to successfully integrate this unto my site.
First thing Im nowhere near being considered Tech savvy. I can follow basic instruction however.
Could someone post exactly how I could embed this into my homepage.
I can figure the linking and sizing and font colors out later.
This is the more important part for me.
Heres my site: http://www.loadedparanormal.com
I want it on the front page, in what I guess would be considered a module block in the center.
Comment by XHIBIT — November 26, 2008 @ 11:17 pm
Hi…this script is awesome…thanks for your contributions…
I have a question though..
Can we make this flash to automatically rotate ? I mean i dont want to the flash move ater the cursor will over to it…
I want it to auto rotate always…
How can ı do that? thnkx for your replies…
Comment by delikassap — November 27, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
I can’t seem to change the names of the tags floating around in the tag cloud, I installed Adobe flash the other day and I got to the source code itself however when I tried changing the names of the tags nothing happened….I also tried embedding it into my website…haven’t uploaded it yet since I’m trying to get it to look right but it doesn’t seem to want to…(I’m using blue voda as my website makes since I’m a complete amateur in making one.)
Help please!
Comment by MIles — December 4, 2008 @ 9:39 am
Would it be alright if you could give me some step by step instructions on how to do this? I’m a complete amateur trying to make his first website, so I have very little knowledge about Adobe Flash or HTML for that matter, please help….
Comment by MIles — December 4, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
@MIles: There’s so much that a system like Blue Voda could screw up. Advanced things like this are probably way out of its scope. To get WP-Cumulus working in plain HTML you should at least have a working knowledge of (X)HTML. Perhaps you should lower your ambitions a little the first time around…
Comment by Roy — December 4, 2008 @ 4:56 pm
T_T…..tsk2…oh well….thank you, I guess you are right that I have to set my sights lower the first time round….planning to take up a web page making course in the future….hate not being able to do this….hey I’ll post my a link to my site here in the future, tell me what you guys think….my theme is “artistic yet so simple to use that a monkey can figure it out”
Comment by MIles — December 6, 2008 @ 6:24 pm
Hey Roy,
thank you for sharing your excellent work.
I try to use different colors for the tags, but I don´t know how.
I use the xml-Version for non-WP-sites, so my tags look like:
TAG 1
I tried following examples:
style=”font-size:12px;color:#ff0000;”
style=”font-size:12px;color:ff0000;”
style=”font-size:12px;color:red;”
style=”font-size:12px;color:0xFF0000″
but nothing works.
Maybe you have an advice for me.
Thank you,
Martin
Comment by Martin — December 10, 2008 @ 9:32 am
@Martin: That won’t work. There is no support for per-tag colors in the Flash movie. You could add that in, but because WordPress does not support tag colors either this is not a priority for me.
Comment by Roy — December 10, 2008 @ 10:39 am
Hi Roy, excellent plugin
I want to change de font-family of the tags. I tried to add the style in the xml but it didn’t work.
Is it possible to change the font?
Many thanks!
Comment by Pablo — December 14, 2008 @ 11:33 pm
Is it possible to open the clicked tags on a new window or frame?
Comment by Igor — December 19, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
Ok, I’ve got the source code and edited it. Thank you very much!
Comment by Igor — December 19, 2008 @ 4:03 pm
Hi Roy
I’m about crying. I love this component and I can’t wait to have it working on my site, but i can’t make it work even locally.
If I don’t use the tagcloud.xml file, the flash object appears empty, actually it’s the option I need, in order to be able to recover the tags from a DB.
If I use the tagcloud.xml file, the visual effect works perfectly, but nothing happens when I click a tag.
I have downloaded all the files, components, etc, today from this page. and the wp-cumulus.1.17 from the WordPress site. I also tried several combinations of tagcloud.xml and tagcloud.swf files.
I have tested it by using mozilla firefox and flock, the results are very similar.
Could You help me please?.
Thank you very much.
Have a nice Weekend, a merry Christmas and a very happy new year
Comment by Ivan — December 24, 2008 @ 4:19 am
@Ivan: Do the example files work for you? I know they don’t include the very latest flash movie, but if they work you should be able to work from there. Also, if you’re using in an existing website, please make sure the pages validate using validator.w3.org .
Comment by Roy — December 24, 2008 @ 8:47 am
Dear Sir
Your Cumulus Plugin is excellent .
I suggest however that its real value is as an add on, extension , pluginn etc to applications software where it could be used to reference commands in a GUI instead of the Dialogue Boxes eating screen real estate . I for one would pay money for that. As a graphic artist non programmer i dont have the skills/ knowledge to do it myself but would be happy to help from my skillset if useful.
Regards John Bestevaar
Comment by John Bestevaar — December 26, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
i extremely need this cloud. but i need its .fla to make some changes. i look everywhere on the net but i couıldn’t find. please help me. i will loose my job if i don’t find it. bulbay@gmail.com
Comment by gokhan — January 1, 2009 @ 11:15 am
Hi Roy
Can we define styling for the anchor elements. I just added “a { color: red}” in the html style area, but it did not get reflected.
Could you let me know what to be done to enable mouse over styling for the links inside of flash.
Comment by shafi — January 1, 2009 @ 11:52 am
Also can we execute some javascript when a link is clicked. I want to show up a javascript popup when the link is clicked. Can i do that by just having the tag like below
Say Hi
Comment by shafi — January 1, 2009 @ 12:13 pm
@Gokhan: The sources are here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/download/
@Shafi: There’s no way to set the color though CSS. It shouldn’t be too hard to add into the flash movie though, especially since the last version, which already uses per-tag colors. All you’d need to do is add a color each tag’s xml node and parse that in the Flash movie.
Javascript calls are handled completely different from url calls in Actionscript, so that’s another thing you’ll need to fix inside the Flash movie.
Comment by Roy — January 3, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
Hi Roy,
I don’t know much about programming. I would like to respecfully suggest that if you could create a version that will work with straight HTML (not as a WordPress plugin, or such) to be used on any searchable database I think you’d have something her ethat could really change the face of clouds.
Then again maybe it’s here and I’m just not understanding. All I want to do is add a script or whatever to my database’s main web page (which is HTML) and have it track the popular searches in your movie format. I wanted to get it working as a replacement for the bottom left corner of this page:
http://fwointl.com/clickbank/index.php
Is there such a thing here? Or can you help me mak e it work there?
I’d pay you for your time of course if you were working on it, but if there’s already sometrhing to download I can “tinker” and then see if I need some paid assistance.
Thanks and Happy New Year!
Mark London
http://www.fwointl.com
Comment by Mark London — January 6, 2009 @ 1:57 pm
Hi Mark. The example files should get you started. The problem is that every database is different, and the harder parts (getting the best keywords out of whatever system it is you’re using) is specific to each solution. The flash movie has a pretty straightforward interface and can be fed pretty much any kind of data formatted in the correct XML syntax.
Comment by Roy — January 6, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
Hi Roy,
this is a wornderful work! Congratulations.
How about using this tagcloud in commercial projects? I found it so nice, that i already tested it, with our own CMS, which is based on Zope/Python. Would it be possible to use the tagcloud in our commercial projects?
Thanx
Toby
Comment by Toby — January 7, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
Hi Toby. WP-Cumulus is open source, so please, by all means, use it for commercial projects. As long as you’re not selling it as a product you’ll be fine.
Comment by Roy — January 7, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
Hi Roy,
thanx a lot for the quick and positive reply! We will enjoy your tagcloud on our intranet system
Regards
Toby
Comment by Toby — January 7, 2009 @ 3:17 pm
Do you have an ActionScript 2.0 version of this? One that uses script in the time line rather than an external file? I only know AS2.0 right now, but I’d still love to be able to integrate this into a site I’m working on.
Thanks!
Comment by Paetzold — January 8, 2009 @ 7:19 pm
@Paetzold: Drop me an email. The first few versions were AS2, so I can probably hook you up with that code.
Comment by Roy — January 9, 2009 @ 8:47 pm
Hi,
I would like to use the WP-Cumulus on my “normal” web site, and could implement it without any problem, except for one thing : I use strict xhtml, and the tag is not accepted – no custom tags allowed in sctrict xhtml. Is there a way around?
Thanks,
sanji
Comment by sanji — January 18, 2009 @ 11:03 am
Hi Sanji. It looks like some html was stripped out of your comment. If the tag you’re referring to is inside the tag cloud you can urlencode that tag.
Comment by Roy — January 18, 2009 @ 3:38 pm
Thanks Roy, this solved the problem!
Indeed, it was the tag that was causing an error. Changing it to & lt; tags & gt;, and doing the same for the a href links (which are not allowed neither) solved the problem!
Thanks a lot, and thanks for this amazing tool which I am now using on http://www.sogival.com
sanji
Comment by sanji — January 18, 2009 @ 5:08 pm
Hello and congratulations for this flash code.
I use this tag cloud in php-fusion7 by an infusion called “cumulus”
It work perfectly but still causes the only XHTML validation error, the same of this page:
element “tags” undefined :
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roytanck.com%2F2008%2F05%2F19%2Fhow-to-repurpose-my-tag-cloud-flash-movie%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&ss=1&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.606
Did you find a solution to stay html valid using this flash wonderful animation?
Thanks a lot,
Yannick
Comment by Wikipedia — January 20, 2009 @ 2:49 am
@Wikipedia: The errors on that page aren’t caused by the plugin. Just some silly mistakes I made. I’ll correct them, but Cumulus shouldn’t cause your website to not validate.
Comment by Roy — January 20, 2009 @ 11:38 am
Thank you for the quick answer Roy – I read you received a lot of messages – I share how hard it could be.
I think your code is ok to render the what you want .
It is the validator make mistake when reads this element , he guess we produced this code as html, whereas is is xml to be read by the flash embed only.
That’s why this problem semms difficult to solve.
Will we have to produce and external xml file to call in flash embed variables?
Don’t hesitate to answer if you think it could be a solution!
by this link you can read the explanation of the error without any other :
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.presume-coupable.com
Comment by Wikipedia — January 20, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
sorry ,
wanted to say “I think your code is ok to render the what you want
( my term were escaped)
Comment by Wikipedia — January 20, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
very sorry:
wanted to say “I think your code is ok to render the xml element….”
Comment by Wikipedia — January 20, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
@Wikipedia: Another option may be to urlencode the tag cloud. That way, validation should be fine.
Comment by Roy — January 20, 2009 @ 4:12 pm
Thank you for releasing this!
Comment by Sam Tanner — January 20, 2009 @ 9:06 pm
Thank you for a great plugin.
Is there any possibility to make different horizontal and vertical radiuses?
Is it possible to limit circulation of the tags inside the flash area?
Comment by Alex — January 20, 2009 @ 11:41 pm
Hi Alex. Someone else contacted me by email with the same question a while ago. Here’s what worked for him:
1. Download the development version and open the project in Flash (CS2 or better).
2. Open the Tagcloud.as file,and look for this line: mcList[j].x = rx3 * per;
3. Change to: mcList[j].x = 5 * rx3 * per;
4. Run the movie.
This should make the cloud five times wider. You can of course edit the number to suit your needs or do something similar to the y coord.
Comment by Roy — January 21, 2009 @ 9:02 am
Roy,
This is a flippin awesome tag cloud implementation. I have a question for you though.
What did you choose to develop this in? Flex? Flash? Something else?
I want to develop something…. similar… and was hoping to get some pointers on how to get started. I’m familiar with Java and Javascript, so I’m hoping it will be an easy learning curve for me…
Thanks!
-Steve
Comment by Steve — January 24, 2009 @ 4:44 am
Wow you guys are cool, it’s really late for this cause im too sleepy for this, but before that i will bookmarked this page, and since today is Chinese New Year, i will skip this Wonderfull stuff. All I wanna do now is, Thank You So Much Roy
You Are The Best
Comment by Go — January 25, 2009 @ 10:39 pm
Hi there.. thats an amazing script. Hmm maybe someone know if its possible to open tags in the tagcloud as target=”_top”. Id like to use it as iframe and the tag site opens in the iframe.. would be great if one could give me a little hint on that.. adding the target=”_top” to the xml file didnt work in my case?
Comment by Rom — January 28, 2009 @ 2:18 pm
oh I forgot… thank you for that plugin – its simply the coolest tag system available..
Comment by Rom — January 28, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
me again! Just to let people that _top can be included by simply adding links in form like
href=”javascript:top.window.location=’http://www.deinlink.de’;” to the tag inside of the .xml file. thanks again for the awesome work!
Comment by Rom — January 28, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
Thanks for the plugin and fix with greek characters!
Its working fine now
Comment by babis — January 29, 2009 @ 10:15 am
How can i make the cursor pointer
Comment by babis — January 29, 2009 @ 11:15 am
Hi Roy,
I’ve embedded the plug-in and got the tags working on my homepage. The site is developped with Freeway which does the embedding automatically. My only problem is to pass the “dist true” parameter to the movie. It seems off by defaults and I don’t manage to modify the code on my page to make it work. I’ve not understood your answer to some previous post on the same subject. Could you explain ?
Thanks in advance and above all thanks for the work.
John
Comment by John Fowles — January 29, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
@babis: I’ve had some trouble with the buttonMode property in Flash, so it’s currently not set for the tags. I’ll look into this for future versions. Having a hand pointer would be nice and will increase usability.
@John: I’m not quite sure which earlier answers you’re referring to, but being able to pass flashvars to the movie is crucial for changing settings. ‘distr’ is simply one of those flashvars, so if you have been able to change things like dimensions and colors, setting the distribution mode should work the same way.
Comment by Roy — January 30, 2009 @ 8:45 am
Hi.
Is it possible to open the clicked tags on a new window. If Yes, what changes required in code.
Comment by Smith — February 7, 2009 @ 7:54 am
@Smith: You can either edit the Flash movie (look for “_self” in the Tag.as file), or use javascript (someone posted code on the WordPress forum if I remember correctly).
Comment by Roy — February 10, 2009 @ 12:05 pm
Roy, great stuff.
I’m writing a helper for CakePHP for this. Just a couple of questions, though:
Tags are being partly cut off at the edge of the div. Is there a way to reduce the diameter of the sphere to reduce the lateral movement?
What significance does the cats mode have? Is this WP specific? (I don’t do WP)
Presumably I can alter the code to load fonts on-the-fly so that tags with defined styles will display appropriately. Have you or anyone else done this?
Comment by leo ponton — February 14, 2009 @ 9:22 pm
Thanks for the great plug in Roy and most of all thanks for the “how to” page. Beautiful and functional!
I made a module with it for Social Web CMS, a Digg clone. http://www.socialwebcms.com .
Regards,
CP
Comment by Catchpen — February 22, 2009 @ 7:27 am
@Leo: Try reducing the height to make the sphere smaller.
The cats mode is indeed quite WP-specific. It allows to add your blog’s categories into the mix, but in most cases yu won’t need this outside of WP.
Unfortunately, the font needs to be embedded. You can change it quite easily, but not per tag, and embedding a lot of fonts in the movie will make it huge.
Comment by Roy — February 27, 2009 @ 10:17 am
Wonderfull PlugIn!
I’d like to add a mouseover command to the links to switch images, like:
http://www…../portfolio/flamenco/index.html” rel=”nofollow”>Flamenco
I know, I have to add the URL….
The xml-version for the integration in a standard website is working fine, except the mouseover/mouseout.
Any ideas? Thanks
Comment by Tobi — March 2, 2009 @ 9:14 pm
Addition:
rel=”nofollow” is replacing the following:
onmouseover=”hiLite(’karte1′,’i26′)” onmouseout=”hiLite(’karte26′,’kartei26′)
Comment by Tobi — March 2, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
Hi Tobi. You’d need to hack the Flash movie to get that working. It already has event handlers for the events, so bascially all you’d need to do is add in the correct javascript calls.
Comment by Roy — March 3, 2009 @ 9:32 am
I’ll be porting this to DotNetNuke as a tag/category cloud.
Great work!
codegecko
Comment by codegecko — March 6, 2009 @ 4:10 pm
Hey Roy!
Thanks a million! I was thinking of implementing a simple home page for my site. Thanks to you, I should be up and running asap! cheers!
Did I mention thanks a lot?
Comment by Arvindh Sundararajan — March 10, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
Hi Roy
Thanks for sharing this , it’s great
Do you know of a version where I can put javascript into the href or on an onclick event ?
how to get a link to open a target = _ blank ?
Thanks for your insight
Best regards
Tibor
Comment by Tibor — March 13, 2009 @ 10:26 am
Hi Tibor. I’m afraid that you’ll have to edit the Flash movie to be able to properly call javascript. Flash handles url requests and script call differently nowadays. While you’re in there it’s pretty easy to change ‘_self’ to ‘_blank’ in Tag.as.
Comment by Roy — March 13, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
Hi Roy,
great job. i have a problem. i would like to take youre plugin in iWeb as an Webwidget. it works the same as an iframe. if i klick on any link, the page load in the iframe. where can i change the code to load the new page in the same frame where display are my main page?
please can you help me?
best regards
Didi
Comment by didi — March 13, 2009 @ 7:16 pm
@didi: You’ll need to edit the Flash file to change this. Look for ‘_self’ in the Tag.as file. Change this to whatever suits your needs, and publish the movie.
Comment by Roy — March 13, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
Hi Roy,
thanks for your help. i have found the Development Version and have changed the tag.as.
It works great.
Greetings
Didi
Comment by didi — March 13, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
Thanks for a great piece of software! Got it running in Vb.Net straight out of the box! Brilliant!
Comment by Ian — March 14, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
Hi,
looks like a nice plugin!
But can it be used to show a posts cloud?
If so, what do I have to change in the plugin files?
Comment by Ivar — March 14, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
By the way, when I used the Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ I got 32 errors and 24 warnings using the plugin.
Any plans on fixing those things?
Comment by Ivar — March 15, 2009 @ 12:07 am
@Ivar: The plugin’s output should contain no markup errors and be valid xhtml. Is your page html4 by any chance?
In order to have the plugin display post titles you’d have to change the call to wp_tag_cloud to the appropriate template tag. If you can get the returned data formatted right (as a list of links) it should work. If you use long post titles, it will probably look pretty messy though…
Comment by Roy — March 15, 2009 @ 1:59 am
Thanks! I’ll try it out.
When it comes to validation my page validates without errors as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. But when I have included your plugin I got that massive list of errors and varnings.
Have you come across that before?
Comment by Ivar — March 15, 2009 @ 9:56 am
Hi Roy,
Thank you very much for the worderful tool! Here I have a little problem though. I just downloaded the example you provide on this page, example.html works perfectly, but example_xml.html will always showing empty cloud. No matter what I try, I couldn’t get the xml working. Sorry to ask but are you sure it is working on your side? I’m using IE6. Many thanks for your help!
Comment by Jeff — March 18, 2009 @ 11:04 am
Hi Jeff. This is probably some pesky security limitation in IE6. Once you put the files online it will work. I’ve just confirmed this using IE6 under XP.
Comment by Roy — March 18, 2009 @ 11:33 am
Hi Roy,
Many thanks for the quick response! I will try that. Cheers!
Comment by Jeff — March 18, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
Hi,
I have a small problem and will be glad for any help provided…
I tried to use WP-cumulus on my web-site without WordPress, but the problem I’ve met was that when I tried to add a link on the another website (for example google) I did not succeed – such link does not work.
Can anybody help me?
Comment by B@mbI — March 18, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
Hi B@mbi. You’ll need to add a parameter called “allowScriptAccess” to the code that embeds the movie, and set it to “always”. That should fix the issue where links to other domains do not work.
Comment by Roy — March 19, 2009 @ 9:26 am
Thx, for the reply.
But can u explain where exactly I should add it?
Into the var so = new SWFObject(”tagcloud.swf”, “tagcloud”, “600″, “400″, “7″, “#ffffff”);
?
Comment by B@mbI — March 19, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
@B@mbI: the line you should add is
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");. There are a bunch of similar lines already, so you can simply add this one.Comment by Roy — March 19, 2009 @ 7:57 pm
can the tag names (text) be instead images? so instead of moving and clickable text it will be images?
Comment by xeuch — March 19, 2009 @ 8:01 pm
I’ve been playing around with your examples, especially the xml one and can’t get images to display like your flickr cloud. Am I wasting my time trying to accomplish this? Or do you know of a way to do this?
Comment by Jim — March 19, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
Hi, I have difficulty to implement the Cumulus in my blog. =/ Don’t understand yet how I can adapt it to others contexts at tags. I have a blog in the blogs.sun.com, and would like to use this plugin.
Awesome job!
Thanks!
Comment by Marlon — March 20, 2009 @ 5:01 am
@Marlon: If you want to hook it up to blogs.sun.com somehow, you’ll have to figure out how to make that system generate tags in the XML format that Cumulus eats. If you are able to upload the swf and add bits of code to your blog, setting up a static version (which reads the tags from a file or from flashvars) shouldn’t be too hard. Some programming skills required though.
Comment by Roy — March 20, 2009 @ 10:12 am
In my quest to get an image to appear in the cloud, I just found that I can’t get the links in the example to work. Any ideas?
Comment by Jim — March 20, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
Are you linking to another domain? Then you have to add a line to the embed code. It’s in an earlier comment by me on this page.
Comment by Roy — March 20, 2009 @ 3:06 pm
I am trying to use the examples you provided without modification. When I click on a link in the cloud, nothing happens. I tried to re-read all the above comments, but really don’t see what I have to do to get the links to work. Is is just adding a “target=’_blank” to the a href tags?
Thank you, jim
Comment by Jim — March 20, 2009 @ 3:33 pm
Sorry Jim, I got confused. The line you need to add is
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");.Comment by Roy — March 20, 2009 @ 4:25 pm
Even after adding the allowScriptAccess, the links wouldn’t work from my home computer in either IE or FF. I then uploaded the sample and it worked fine. All your links worked. Go figure!
Now, I am still trying to see if it will display photographs. Nothing I have tried so far has worked. So, am I wasting my time trying to figure this out? Could you add something to parse the xml image tag?
Thank you.
Comment by Jim — March 21, 2009 @ 2:56 pm
@Jim: I’m not quite sure what it is you’re trying, but if you’re not seriously modifying the Flash movie they yeah you might be wasting your time. This thing was purpose built for tags, and won’t accept any tags except <a>, and only a few of its possible attributes.
The Flickr/Picasa version (which is really quite different except for the 3D code) works well because it does images only. It’s mixing the two that’s troublesome. I have experimented with it a couple of times, but I really didn’t like the results very much. It also makes no sense to add image support to the WordPress version, as WP doesn’t let you add images to tags. I wrote this page because I wanted to encourage people to port WP-Cumulus to other platforms, but it seems I’ve opened somewhat of a pandora’s box because now people want stuff that the movie was never designed to do
Comment by Roy — March 21, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
Well, I guess you’ve answered my question. What I was thinking was that the tag cloud could be fed photo image information in the xml file, but now I see that can’t be done. Can that be done in the flick widget? Really what I’m looking to do is to display photographs that are not in either a flickr or picasa web gallery. I thought that I could do that in the tag cloud. Since I’m not a flash developer, I can’t build my own.
I’ll drop my quest now as I see it’s not possible with either of your tools.
Comment by Jim — March 22, 2009 @ 2:21 am
Hi Jim. I’m considering what to do with the Flickr version. It wouldn’t be very hard to create a version that uses XML and images stored locally, but I’m not quite sure I need the additional flow of support email/comments. On the one hand some of the issues that people have run into have helped me make WP-Cumulus better, but I find that answering all the email I get about these projects is actually keeping me from creating new stuff.
Comment by Roy — March 22, 2009 @ 9:18 am
hi roy, i want to use your cloud into another flash movie.
i just need the cloud to display some specific keyword.
i tried to publish tagcloud.fla found in the flash sources folder,
but nothing displays.
i read i have to pass the vars to another flash movie but
adobe page doesn’t load and as i’m new to as3 i don’t know
how to do that!
should be simple cause i don’t need implementation, external XML…
could you show me the way?
thx
Comment by marco7anb — April 6, 2009 @ 3:46 pm
I do motion graphics for a living and would love to create a “faux” version of a tag cloud. A simply interactive cloud where we could project a cloud (seeded with our own custom content of course) and then pretend to interact with it.
I have not downloaded the flash files but wondering if your build can work in this manner.
If we simply change the content of the “tags” will we be able to produce a cloud (in a standalone flash player) to playback?
Comment by David Jolosky — April 6, 2009 @ 4:06 pm
@David: Yes, you can create a standalone version (as a windows .exe or using Adobe’s standalone player) using the source files. The tags are in an XML file, so it won’t really be a single file, but as long as you keep both files in the same directory you should be fine.
Comment by Roy — April 6, 2009 @ 5:57 pm
@Roy
Roy, Thanks much for the response. This will prove to be a great feature for the show I’m producing media for. I’m reading your posts now on how to change parameters (make cloud bigger, slower, background color, etc.) Where should I be looking. I see the VARS information but not sure where to implement those for a standalone. Should I just be tweaking inside of the .fla? Can I scale, expand, etc. the cloud within the FLA?
I’m not a NOOB but not an EXPERT either in Flash.
cheers
Comment by David Jolosky — April 7, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
@David: The vars mentioned on this page are all flashvars, that are passed to the movie by your (HTML) page. You can see most of them in the code example above. If you’re using a different way of embedded Flash (i.e. not SWFObject), you might need a different way to pass that vars (info here).
You’ll only need to edit the Flash movie if you want to change things like the font, the highlight effect, scaling (it fills the available space by default, which works for most, but you might need something else), turning it into a cube, etc….
Comment by Roy — April 8, 2009 @ 10:30 am
I’m looking for someone that could possibly give me a hand on installing this on a non word press site, possibly as a flash file to which O’m completly in the dark about.
I use an IntegraMod PhpBB heres the link http://loadedparanormal.com
I can also be reached at XHIBIT_A_@hotmail.com
Comment by XHIBIT — April 8, 2009 @ 4:42 pm
Hi Roy it’s a great plugin.
I try to export the cumulus to the CMS artiphp but I have a problem.
Tags do not appears when URL contains this character ‘&’ for example “site.php?test=ok&test2=ok”
Is there a solution for this probleme.
Sorry I’m not speak english very well.
Comment by dejese — April 8, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
@dejese: You should urlencode the entire tag cloud before passing it to the Flash movie.
Comment by Roy — April 8, 2009 @ 8:58 pm
I don’t bielieve I’ve missed this.
Thank you very much.
Comment by dejese — April 8, 2009 @ 10:25 pm
Very useful and creative plugin. Thanks a lot.
Comment by Effigy — April 10, 2009 @ 10:29 am
Does it work with Smarty template?
Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 12:55 pm
@Den: I haven’t tried, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
Comment by Roy — April 11, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
I tried it but, it only calls one tag…
I used one single line of code to query the tags…
I’ll give the example,
{section name=I loop=$aTags}
{$aTags[I].key|clean|truncate:’20′}
{/section}
What do you make of it?
Any ideas?
Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
{section name=I loop=$aTags}
{$aTags[I].key|clean|truncate:'20'}
{/section}
Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
Sorry about repeated comment.
I noticed I can’t use
tags in the comment area<a href="{$aTags[I].link}" style="font-size:{$aTags[I].size}px">{$aTags[I].key|clean|truncate:'20'}</a>
Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
I got it to work with my Smarty template.
Silly me….
I forgot to include the Smarty tags {section name=I loop=$aTags}{/section} in the variables…
For reference:
here is how the code should be lay out…
so.addVariable("tagcloud", "<tags>{section name=I loop=$aTags}<a href=’{$aTags[I].link}’ style=’font-size:{$aTags[I].size}px;’>{$aTags[I].key|clean|truncate:’20′}</a>{/section}</tags>");
Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
Hi Den. I’m glad you got it working, because there’s no way I could’ve talked you through it.
Comment by Roy — April 11, 2009 @ 7:37 pm
Hi Roy,
Is there a AS2 version of the flash tag cloud? I am working on a project i as2. It could be really nice to implement the tag cloud in. I am not fully ‘airborn’ in AS3.
Thanks.
Comment by Mikkel — April 14, 2009 @ 6:27 pm
Hi Mikkel. I do have an old as2 version, but it’s rather ‘crude’ compared to the current version. It lacks features and is unnecessarily heavy on the CPU. Plese email me, I’ll send you a copy if you like.
Comment by Roy — April 14, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
Hi Roy, really a great plug in!
I currently try to embed it into my iWeb website. Apple’s iWeb provides a so called HTML-Widget for that. At the resulting HTML page it is embedded in a frame. And so when I click on a tag at the cloud it reloads only the frame (size of the cloud) with the target URL. Hmmm.
My idea: use the “target” option of HTML links for each tag but you are pointing out that this has to be handled by a modified flash file.
Okay. But is there a free flash compiler available for Macs?
Or is there anybody who is able to compile “Tag.as” with line 104 modified to something like “navigateToURL(request,”_top”);”?
On the long term, it would be great to have this setting as an optional setting at the embedded javascript code at the HTML file.
Thanks!
Mat.
Comment by Mat — April 20, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
Great Innovation… BTW how can we accomplish having multiple xml files so as WPCum becames a 3D Navigator? My first idea is to have some sort of index fashioned this way…
Comment by Seba — April 22, 2009 @ 3:03 pm
@Seba: That would require a bit of programming, you’re completely welcome to give it a try!
Comment by Roy — April 23, 2009 @ 8:25 am
Hi. I like working with words so much that i´m studying as3 just to reporpouse this swf.
I´m stucked with ExternallInterface.Call(a_javascript_funcion_in_html). I´m writing this command in one of the EVENTS of Tag.as . But the javascript function doesn´t launch.
I want to make a wiki with this: http://www.libasoles.com.ar/cumulus.html . What I want is to position the mouse over a word and see a description (in brief) before clicking.
Btw, I managed to add new words by reloading the swf with a new list. Now I need actions called from flash.
Comment by Guillermo — April 23, 2009 @ 9:23 pm
@Seba What you want to do is something i´d like to see too. It´d be great to navigate throw words.
Comment by Guillermo — April 23, 2009 @ 9:25 pm
Any thoughts on what would cause an “Operation Aborted” error in Internet Explorer 7?
Comment by Kyle — April 25, 2009 @ 1:31 am
Update:
I found out that Internet Explorer 7 actually sucks harder than other versions and apparently can’t handle Javascript inside div tags or tables…
Internet Explorer 8 fixes this problem but (for my site at least) cuts off all content after that…
I.E. is like the retarded fish of web browsers… But I still want my site to be accessible to everyone… Uggh… Any thoughts?
Comment by Kyle — April 25, 2009 @ 9:09 pm
Hi Kyle. You might want to iron out that few markup errors that are in your site. But you could also switch to a different way of embedding Flash. The method described here under ‘making progress’ should work. I’ve added that to WP-Cumulus as a ‘compatibility mode’. All the variables need to be on one line, and it’s a little less elegant. but it does not require javascript.
Comment by Roy — April 26, 2009 @ 8:25 am
is it possible to generate the tag cloud and then have it as a Flash movie or converted to .avi or mpeg as we would like to use this on our stand at the Business Expo… playing it on a 40″LCD Panel…. just as a rotating movie clip…
thanks,
Andrew
Comment by Andrew — April 29, 2009 @ 6:23 am
Hi Andrew. I’ve use the free Windows Media Encoder to capture animations as video. It works quite well if your computer is fast enough. Since Flash has no convenient way of saving rendered frames as (a sequence of) images this is probably your best bet. It worked great for some of my experiments. This too was quite a heavy movie, but I experienced no frame drops capturing at quite high resolution.
Comment by Roy — April 29, 2009 @ 1:45 pm
Hey Roy,
Great flash! Any way to embed the flashvars within the .swf file? Would that be done in the TagCloud.as file?
Thanks,
Richard
Comment by Richard — May 1, 2009 @ 5:27 am
Hi Richard. Yes, in TagCloud.as there’s a bit of code that sets the flashvars to a default value when they’re not passed to the movie. You can use this to set things like width and height. As for the tags themselves, you should simply create a new XML object with the tags string and pass that to init.
Comment by Roy — May 1, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
Great tool Roy, thanks for making this available !
I just installed on a ASP VB.Net website.
The need to be generated dynamically on the fly, thus the tagcloud.xml solution was impossible.
And the FlashVars solution seem to be problematic for IE (Grmmbbllll….).
So the only solution I found was to modify the source flash code, and replace ‘tagcloud.xml’ by ‘tagcloud_xml.aspx’. Then I generate
Comment by Mike — May 13, 2009 @ 2:10 pm
…
Then I generate a ‘tagcloud_xml.aspx’ asp.net file that dynamically searches for the tags in my database and generates the right output.
All in all it works fine !
One little suggestion/request though…
Would it be possible to add a FlashVar like ‘ XMLfile=mypath/myfile.xml’ ?
It would allow anyone, without modifying the Action Script code, to point to the right dynamic script.
For instance ‘XMLFile=/scripts/tagcloud_xml.aspx?myparameter=myvariables’
Thanks again for the great job so far!
Comment by Mike — May 13, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
Hi Mike. I’ll consider adding that in in future releases. It doesn’t affect the WP version, so as long as it doesn’t add too much bloat I guess that’s OK.
Comment by Roy — May 13, 2009 @ 2:22 pm
@Roy/@Tibor:
how/when can i use javascript (onclick) inside tagcloud.html or tagcloud.xml with out opening up tag.as? can something similar be done using actionscript (not a flash developer)?
Comment by CloudNine — May 13, 2009 @ 11:22 pm
@CloudNine: The thing to realize here is that the tag cloud is fed to the movie as XHTML because that can be parsed as XML. Flash doesn’t interpret (X)HTML as a browser would, and does not support onClick without that support being coded into the movie. Since the WordPress version does not need this, I’ve not added true javascript support. Using ‘javascript: …’ links should work in most cases.
Comment by Roy — May 14, 2009 @ 9:07 am
Hello, could you send me as 2.0 sources you mentioned earlier
send it at: nitroflasher at gmail.com
Thanks :]
Comment by Fsr — May 16, 2009 @ 10:50 am
Hi,
i’am looking for tag claud but im looking for code of this cloud: http://qna.info.pl – this cloud here its better, do you know wher can i find the source code for this baby ??
Comment by elo_ziomek — May 19, 2009 @ 3:21 pm
@elo: You should try contacting the author of that website. It looks like a modified version of WP-Cumulus, and he or she might let you have the sources.
Comment by Roy — May 19, 2009 @ 10:21 pm
Hi Roy,
Please help me, I am using your script in my site.
But I couldn’t set the link to target _blanck, i.e. when an user click I link in the cloud the link always open in
the same window, even if I put target=”_blanck” in the link.
Thanks a lot!
Rodrigo.
Comment by Rodrigo — May 23, 2009 @ 11:49 pm
@Rodrigo: You’ll need to edit the flash movie to change this. More info is here.
Comment by Roy — May 24, 2009 @ 7:19 pm
Hi Roy,
How can I download the flash source?
Can I do a cloud of images(JPG)?
Thanks a lot!
Comment by Rodrigo — May 25, 2009 @ 2:16 am
Sounds to me like you’re looking for this. That page also has links to all the sources.
Comment by Roy — May 25, 2009 @ 12:34 pm
Hi Roy, Thanks again!
I am looking for the WP-cumulus (TAg cloud) code also.
Could you show me where to download?
I will change _self to _blank, in the “target”.
Thanks a lot!
Comment by Rodrigo — May 25, 2009 @ 2:26 pm
Hi Roy,
Could you please tell me the best way to “compile” .fla to .swf file?
Thanks a lot!
Comment by Rodrigo — May 25, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Hi Rodrigo. You’ll need to publish the movie from Flash CS3 or better. A trial version should work.
Comment by Roy — May 26, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
Hi Roy!
THANK YOU A LOT!
Your work is wonderfull!
I put a link to roytanck dot com in my page!
Comment by Rodrigo — May 26, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
Great info! However, how would I use the flash tag cloud with images from my site folder. That is without going through Flicker? Any help would be appreciated!
Comment by Cedric — May 26, 2009 @ 11:01 pm
Hi Cedric, I think this is what you’re looking for.
Comment by Roy — May 27, 2009 @ 7:53 am
Roy,
We are looking at using your awesome tag cloud in a standard asp.net web environment. I saw the post where Mike managed to do this. We are looking to basically feed the tag cloud the result of a database select and then make the results clickable links that would filter the data grid in the center of our page. Off the top of your head, what would be the best way to create the java post back to refresh the data grid we have in the center. Effectivly using the tag cloud to filter the center grid data ???
Thanks
Tim
Comment by Timothy — May 27, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Hi Timothy. If you format the query results like as regular XHTML links, just like in the example files, the basic principle should work. You can generate a new XML file each time the page is loaded if needed. If you’re looking to use AJAX things will become a bit more complicated. The movie has no interface to make it load new data at runtime, and does not currently support calling javascript upon click (other than through ‘javascript:…’). You’d need to edit the Tag.as file to interact with javascript properly, and republish the movie.
Comment by Roy — May 28, 2009 @ 8:39 am
Anyone have an example of loading a twitter feed into the cloud?
Fantastic work TImothy!
B
Comment by Brendan — June 2, 2009 @ 6:10 pm
I mean Roy
)
Comment by Brendan — June 2, 2009 @ 7:13 pm
Brendan, I feel 140 chars is way too much for a ‘tag’, but you should definitely check out tweet3d.com .
Comment by Roy — June 2, 2009 @ 7:14 pm
Hi
It is possiblie to feed the cloud from tags being read from a database with php or jsp?
Comment by Ângelo — June 5, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
Hi Angelo. Yes, if you format the results of the query like the example xml you can feed it to the movie.
Comment by Roy — June 6, 2009 @ 11:22 am
Roy, very cool ! I like it. How can this be done for a Joomla site?
Comment by Eric — June 9, 2009 @ 6:03 pm
@Eric: Joomlabear has a Joomla version: http://joomlabear.com/Joomulus/
Comment by Roy — June 10, 2009 @ 8:10 am
I am using a CMS included in our software pack. We can’t upload swf movies. The hosted flickr version however is no problem. I really would like to add also the tagcloud. Do you have a hosted version available or do you know any hosted version?
Many thanks!
Marcel
Comment by Marcel — June 14, 2009 @ 4:25 pm
Hi Marcel. No, I don’t have a hosted version. Hosting the movie could turn out to be very expensive. I serve the Flickr one a couple of million times a month from my Amazon S3 account. The cost is bearable, but that movie is tiny by comparison. If a hosted version of Cumulus would catch on like the regular Wordpress version did I’d probably have to sell my house
.
And besides, the Flickr widget takes a single url as input, whereas Cumulus would require the tags. The code snippet would be huge.
Comment by Roy — June 15, 2009 @ 8:55 am
thank for using open source code and releasing a great plugin.
as a junior AS3 programmer I’m trying to read which tag was click and activate some M.C.
however i can’t get this info from Tag.as class.
i tried converting _tx.text to public but i can’t read from the main stage/time-line any clue where should i direct my efforts to?
Basically I’m trying to keep all integration within the flash environment and not opening new site/window
thx a lot
Comment by daniel — June 16, 2009 @ 3:55 am
Hi Daniel, you could pass a reference to the main movie to the tags when they’re created. If you then store that reference you can use it to read stuff from the main timeline. If the data doesn’t change you could consider passing it instead.
Comment by Roy — June 16, 2009 @ 11:14 am
thx Roy,
I appreciate taking the time to replay.
I will try taking this approach.
Daniel
Comment by daniel — June 16, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
Hi Roy,
I just installed IE 8 on my Windows Vista.
The tag cloud did not work! Include in the page roytanck.com (top-right corner)
I already installed the last version of Flash.
Dou you know any news about it?
Thanks!
Comment by Rodrigo — June 21, 2009 @ 11:40 pm
Hi Rodrigo. I have a IE8 on my PC and it displays both the flash movies on my blog. Did you install flash player prior to installing IE8 or after?
Comment by Roy — June 22, 2009 @ 8:27 am
Hi Roy,
I installed flash player before IE8.
But I am trying other way to call the Tag Cloud, instead javascript, I will use the tag.
I need your help, How can I inform the XML file that the object should read to fill the tag cloud?
As you can see below, I tried to pass the parameter “feed” with “xml/myfile.xml” in the flashvars param.
But it didnt work. Could you please help me? Thanks!
Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
param name=”flashvars” value=”tcolor=0×333333&tspeed=90&distr=true&xml=myxml/myfile.xml”
Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
Hi Roy,
I get the answer!
Please, forgive me if I wrote so much.
One more time, THANKS A LOT!
Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 6:52 pm
Hi Roy
Great plugin, many thanks. Am using it in a vb.net project and is working beautifully! How do one set the no flash parameter to true –
from http://www.roytanck.com/2009/03/17/the-top-5-wp-cumulus-hacks/
“EDIT: As of version 1.21 this is an option under ‘Settings — WP Cumulus’.”
what is the parameter name?
Comment by Ian — June 26, 2009 @ 12:50 am