How to repurpose my tag cloud Flash movie

WP-Cumulus tag cloud plugin

WP-Cumulus is now open source. So instead of going through the documentation below you can download it and have a look inside. See http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/ for more info. You can get the development version which includes the sources from the download page.
To fix an XSS vulnerability, Version 1.23 of the plugin no longer supports calling ‘javascript:’ links from tags. If you need the Flash movie to interface with javascript, I recommend downloading the source files and implementing AS3’s ExternalInterface class to handle communication.

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.

  1. The movie requires Flash Player 9 or better.
  2. It contains only Latin characters. This short tutorial guides you though the process of adding support for your language.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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  4. WP-Cumulus 1.15: Color!
  5. Nabaztag flash movie source files
Roy | May 19, 2008 | English, Flash, Internet, WordPress plugins | Comments (397)
Tags: , , , , , ,

397 Comments

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. Hi same is here, pls suggest wht should we do next!

    Comment by san — May 22, 2008 @ 4:48 pm

  5. 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

  6. Link: 让你的tag cloud动起来! | thinkboke.com-辛博客

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. Link: Visual Tag Clouds

  10. 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

  11. 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

  12. 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

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. 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

  17. 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

  18. 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

  19. @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

  20. 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

  21. 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

  22. hey roy can u please tell how can i use this pluggin succesfully in blogger??

    Comment by sam — August 29, 2008 @ 7:55 am

  23. 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

  24. Link: Wp-Cumulus Para Blogger | Corbec Soluciones

  25. 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

  26. 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

  27. 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

  28. 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

  29. 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

  30. hi Roy
    any news with the unicode support
    & greek UTF-8.

    thanks ioannis

    Comment by Ioannis — September 9, 2008 @ 9:18 am

  31. 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

  32. 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

  33. 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

  34. 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

  35. 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

  36. 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

  37. 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

  38. @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

  39. 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

  40. 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

  41. 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

  42. @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

  43. Link: Flash tag clouds « Merveilles du web 2.0

  44. 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

  45. 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

  46. hmm,
    What if we have an href like this : http://www.mysite.com/index.php?id=1&cat=12

    Then what :P ?
    It wont accept the “&” sign or the &

    Any ideas ?

    Comment by Sandbird — October 1, 2008 @ 11:52 am

  47. 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

  48. 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

  49. 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

  50. 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

  51. 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

  52. 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

  53. Hi everyone.
    I can’t use two clouds. How can I do this?

    Comment by Durbek — November 1, 2008 @ 4:47 am

  54. Link: Rob A's (Im)personal Blog
  55. Link: pligg.com

  56. 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

  57. 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

  58. 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

  59. 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

  60. @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

  61. 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

  62. 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

  63. Link: deviation » Blog Archive » Playin’ with cumulus

  64. 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

  65. 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

  66. @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

  67. 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

  68. Link: ALOE » Blog Archive » An install script, a fancy tag cloud and more…

  69. 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

  70. @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

  71. 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

  72. Is it possible to open the clicked tags on a new window or frame?

    Comment by Igor — December 19, 2008 @ 3:30 pm

  73. Ok, I’ve got the source code and edited it. Thank you very much!

    Comment by Igor — December 19, 2008 @ 4:03 pm

  74. 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

  75. @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

  76. 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

  77. 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

  78. 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

  79. 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

  80. @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

  81. 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

  82. 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

  83. 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

  84. 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

  85. 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

  86. 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

  87. @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

  88. Link: Plugin itu namanya WP-Cumulus : adjie’s view

  89. 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

  90. 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

  91. 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

  92. 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

  93. @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

  94. 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

  95. 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

  96. 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

  97. @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

  98. Thank you for releasing this!

    Comment by Sam Tanner — January 20, 2009 @ 9:06 pm

  99. 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

  100. 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

  101. 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

  102. 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

  103. 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

  104. oh I forgot… thank you for that plugin – its simply the coolest tag system available..

    Comment by Rom — January 28, 2009 @ 2:35 pm

  105. 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

  106. Thanks for the plugin and fix with greek characters!
    Its working fine now

    Comment by babis — January 29, 2009 @ 10:15 am

  107. How can i make the cursor pointer

    Comment by babis — January 29, 2009 @ 11:15 am

  108. 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

  109. @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

  110. Link: lj-tagcloud — Чудо{вищные} заметки

  111. 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

  112. @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

  113. 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

  114. 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

  115. @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

  116. 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

  117. Addition:
    rel=”nofollow” is replacing the following:
    onmouseover=”hiLite(‘karte1′,’i26′)” onmouseout=”hiLite(‘karte26′,’kartei26′)

    Comment by Tobi — March 2, 2009 @ 9:24 pm

  118. 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

  119. I’ll be porting this to DotNetNuke as a tag/category cloud.
    Great work!

    codegecko

    Comment by codegecko — March 6, 2009 @ 4:10 pm

  120. 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

  121. 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

  122. 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

  123. 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

  124. @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

  125. 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

  126. 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

  127. 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

  128. 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

  129. @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

  130. 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

  131. 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

  132. 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

  133. Hi Roy,

    Many thanks for the quick response! I will try that. Cheers!

    Comment by Jeff — March 18, 2009 @ 4:02 pm

  134. 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

  135. 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

  136. 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

  137. @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

  138. 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

  139. 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

  140. 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

  141. @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

  142. 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

  143. 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

  144. 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

  145. 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

  146. 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

  147. @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

  148. 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

  149. 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

  150. Link: Twitter follower bio word clouds » Moving at the Speed of Creativity
  151. Link: pligg.com

  152. 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

  153. 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

  154. @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

  155. @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

  156. @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

  157. 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

  158. 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

  159. @dejese: You should urlencode the entire tag cloud before passing it to the Flash movie.

    Comment by Roy — April 8, 2009 @ 8:58 pm

  160. I don’t bielieve I’ve missed this.
    Thank you very much.

    Comment by dejese — April 8, 2009 @ 10:25 pm

  161. Very useful and creative plugin. Thanks a lot.

    Comment by Effigy — April 10, 2009 @ 10:29 am

  162. Does it work with Smarty template?

    Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 12:55 pm

  163. @Den: I haven’t tried, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

    Comment by Roy — April 11, 2009 @ 1:18 pm

  164. 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

  165. {section name=I loop=$aTags}

    {$aTags[I].key|clean|truncate:'20'}

    {/section}

    Comment by Den — April 11, 2009 @ 2:30 pm

  166. 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

  167. 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

  168. 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

  169. 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

  170. 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

  171. 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

  172. 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

  173. @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

  174. 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

  175. @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

  176. Any thoughts on what would cause an “Operation Aborted” error in Internet Explorer 7?

    Comment by Kyle — April 25, 2009 @ 1:31 am

  177. 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

  178. 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

  179. 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

  180. 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

  181. 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

  182. 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

  183. 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

  184. …
    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

  185. 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

  186. @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

  187. @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

  188. 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

  189. 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

  190. @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

  191. 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

  192. @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

  193. 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

  194. 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

  195. 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

  196. 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

  197. 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

  198. 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

  199. 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

  200. Hi Cedric, I think this is what you’re looking for.

    Comment by Roy — May 27, 2009 @ 7:53 am

  201. 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

  202. 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

  203. 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

  204. I mean Roy :( )

    Comment by Brendan — June 2, 2009 @ 7:13 pm

  205. 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

  206. 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

  207. 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

  208. Roy, very cool ! I like it. How can this be done for a Joomla site?

    Comment by Eric — June 9, 2009 @ 6:03 pm

  209. @Eric: Joomlabear has a Joomla version: http://joomlabear.com/Joomulus/

    Comment by Roy — June 10, 2009 @ 8:10 am

  210. Link: Keep on Fighting!

  211. 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

  212. 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

  213. 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

  214. 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

  215. 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

  216. 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

  217. 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

  218. 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

  219. Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 3:30 pm

  220. param name=”flashvars” value=”tcolor=0×333333&tspeed=90&distr=true&xml=myxml/myfile.xml”

    Comment by Rodrigo — June 22, 2009 @ 3:30 pm

  221. 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

  222. Link: 3D TagCloud | List Central Blog

  223. 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

  224. Link: Tagnetic Poetry 1.0 adds shortcode support | Roy Tanck's weblog

  225. As has been said before, really great plugin. I’m successfully using it in several Wordpress situations and now attempting to use it within a self contained Flash project.

    My question is- can “navigateToURL(request,”_self”); (line 104 of Tag.as) be replaced in anyway to move to a frame label within the timeline of the movie I want to host the cloud within. In other words use the cloud as navigation within the main movie?

    thanks for any help you can give.

    Comment by steve — July 6, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

  226. Hi, this is a great script!

    I have one small thing: the roation stops after a few seconds. I’d rather like to have it running for longer or just continue scrolling. I think I have tried all the variables but without success.

    I hope I haven’t missed anything in the instructions or the long list of comments above!

    Thanks a lot!

    Boris

    Comment by Boris — July 7, 2009 @ 11:08 am

  227. Hello. Thanks for the great script.

    For some reason, it won’t read a tagcloud.xml file for me. It only works if the tags are passed as a variable in the script. Any ideas?

    Thanks,
    Charles

    Comment by Charles — August 3, 2009 @ 11:52 pm

  228. Thanks for the heads up on Joomlabear Roy, It works great.

    Comment by John — August 4, 2009 @ 4:37 am

  229. Can this (amazing flash file) by used in a NON word press site?

    Thanks!!!

    Comment by henry — August 6, 2009 @ 5:43 pm

  230. Ehm Henry, that’s what this page is about. The example files should get you started…

    Comment by Roy — August 7, 2009 @ 12:54 pm

  231. great tag cloud! i would like to make a stand-alone version that includes the tags in the final swf so they are not being pulled from an external xml file. i also don’t need the URLs to go along with the tags, just a list of words.
    i am going through the source files to see if i can understand how it’s all put together. will take me a while since i am new to actionscript.
    any hints you can provide to point me in the right direction?

    Comment by alex — August 13, 2009 @ 12:42 am

  232. I have thousands of tags in the xml, when it display using flash, the tags are getting overwrite.

    Is possible to limit the tags from the xml. for example, 30 tags randomly

    Comment by scvinodkumar — August 13, 2009 @ 8:58 am

  233. @scvinodkumar: Yes, it would be possible to do that inside the Flash movie, but it’d make more sense to do it server side, and generate xml with only 30 tags. That saves bandwidth and Flash processing time.

    Comment by Roy — August 13, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

  234. Hi Alex. You could simply use a variable that contains the xml data you need (as a string) and pass that to the init function. Then you’d need to edit Tag.as to remove the click (and probably mouseover) functionality.

    Comment by Roy — August 13, 2009 @ 1:41 pm

  235. Thanks Roy. OK so I’ve got a string array:
    var myTags:Array = [”test1”, “test2”, “test3”, “test4”, ”test5”];

    How would I modify the existing code that loops through the XML nodes and creates the MCs to loop through the array?
    Thanks again.

    Comment by alex — August 13, 2009 @ 9:05 pm

  236. Hi Alex. I couldn’t possibly guide you through that from memory, and I’d have to actually code it to show you how (and be sure it works). I’ve made the code as readable as I could, but I’m afraid you’re on your own from here.

    Comment by Roy — August 14, 2009 @ 7:58 am

  237. Hi Roy,

    First of all, thank you for creating this plug-in and providing the documentation to re-purpose it.

    I’m trying to fit the flash movie into a div with a specific set of dimensions, however the tag cloud is a tad smaller than I would like it to be. Is there an easy way to remove the empty space/padding from the flash movie?

    Comment by Orihime — August 15, 2009 @ 6:32 pm

  238. @Orihime: No, not really. You could edit the resizehandler function in TagCloud.as, but that requires some knowledge of Flash AS3, as well as a copy of Flash CS3 or better.

    Comment by Roy — August 15, 2009 @ 7:42 pm

  239. Thanks for responding. I know very little of AS3 and I’m not if this was the “correct” way to do it, but I decreased the value you divide by when setting the scale in the resizeHolder function and it’s better now :)

    Comment by Orihime — August 16, 2009 @ 6:03 am

  240. Link: aselkim » Iqburen n usmel » Asigna n wawalen

  241. Many Thanks – integrated this into our club website, the example files were really helpful.

    Comment by Davema — August 20, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

  242. Hello,
    I am French, sorry for my English expression
    Thanks for the great script.

    I’d like to charge the tagcloud in another file flash.
    ActionScript :
    var l = new Loader();
    l.load(new URLRequest(“tagcloud.swf”));
    addChild(l);

    But I have a problem with the file .as
    TypeError: Error #1009 : It is impossible to reach the property or the method of a reference of null object. at com.roytanck.wpcumulus::TagCloud()

    I think that it’s because of “this.stage”, but I don’t know which modifications I have to do.
    > is it possible to charge it in a flash ?
    > which modification is necessary to do in the source files ?
    Thanks,
    Germain

    Comment by Germain — September 2, 2009 @ 2:36 pm

  243. Hi Germain. I’ve had this question before, and yes, it has to do with references to the stage. The flashvars are also an issue (the movie expects them in its own scope). Basically, there’s quite a bit of programming involved with this, and you’d have to rewrite things like the scaling algorithm (which is based on stage size). I’m not going to be able to guide you through it I’m afraid, and have no example code available.

    Comment by Roy — September 2, 2009 @ 3:05 pm

  244. Hi,
    Thanks for responding
    For the people interested, I found a solution.
    public function TagCloud()
    {
    addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, AjoutTagCloud)
    }

    private function AjoutTagCloud(pEvt:Event):void
    {
    …// with the contents of the initial “TagCloud” function
    }

    Comment by Germain — September 3, 2009 @ 10:11 pm

  245. This is a great addon! Thanks for sharing!

    Comment by wecreateyou — September 5, 2009 @ 4:10 am

  246. Hi Roy,

    Really like the tag cloud widget!

    So much so that I used in my new website http://www.bredcrums.com.

    Hope everyone else enjoys it too!
    It’s a free signup, so I’d love to hear comments on it.

    David

    Comment by David — September 9, 2009 @ 3:15 pm

  247. Hi Roy,
    I´m looking for the action script 2.0 version of your famous tag cloud. I will love to integrate it to an actionscript 2.0 project that I´m developing.

    Thanks!!

    Comment by Carlos — September 9, 2009 @ 4:24 pm

  248. Hi and what a great plugin. I thought it would make a neat navigational component to add some interest – is there any way I can stop any of the text from disappearing outside the area of the component (I sometimes see parts of words cut-off which, for navigation, isn’t great). Any ideas or thoughts would be appreciated – and what a great piece of work it is!

    Comment by Steve B — September 11, 2009 @ 9:20 pm

  249. Hello Roy,

    I’m trying to use your cloud as a navigation for my html site proAnimateUK.com

    I have two queeries… 1, Can I redirect the href into an iframe on the page (and how?) and 2, Are there any ‘easy to follow’ instructions to embedding a font into your development FLA – I only know very basic flash (from an animation perspectiv – no scripting).

    It is absoluetly fantastic though!!! superb in fact!

    Comment by Martin — September 11, 2009 @ 10:11 pm

  250. Hi Martin. Changing the link target (for all links) is quite easy. More info on changing the font is here.

    Comment by Roy — September 14, 2009 @ 10:22 am

  251. Roy,
    I have installed your flash plugin succesfully on the Moodle educative platform. This looks simply COOL ;)

    Best regards and many thanks for the source and your tutorials!

    Comment by Mario — September 15, 2009 @ 5:01 am

  252. @Mario: Any chance you’d consider releasing your Moodle port? My guess is that lots of people would be interested…

    Comment by Roy — September 15, 2009 @ 9:17 am

  253. Hello!
    First of all – thanks for your wonderful work, Roy.
    I’m just trying to have a background image and the transparent tag cloud on top of it. But somehow the image does not show through. My config:

    …
    so.addParam(“wmode”, “transparent”);
    …

    and

    div#tagcloud {
    background-image: url(../images/content_darkmatter.jpg);
    }

    Is there a chance to get it work?
    Thanks!
    Sura

    Comment by Sura — September 15, 2009 @ 4:46 pm

  254. Hi Sura. At first glance that looks OK. Are you sure the div is called ‘tagcloud’? Any URL I could take a look at?

    Comment by Roy — September 16, 2009 @ 11:23 am

  255. Roy, the Moodle educative plattform is Opensource too. The packages for each SO (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc.) could be downloaded here: http://moodle.org/
    I simply have installed your plugin like a html block and this works perfect.
    If you want to take a look on my page the link is: http:190.241.215.16/moodle

    Comment by Mario — September 18, 2009 @ 3:37 am

  256. Sorry, again the link: http://190.241.215.16/moodle

    Comment by Mario — September 18, 2009 @ 3:40 am

  257. Hi Roy,

    I’ve had some problems using the XMLPATH parameter and getting it to work. I’ve run your example and it works fine. I copied the same structure and had the SWF, XML and HTML file all in the same directory and got it working. I then referenced an XML file within my site structure and also got that working. But, when I try to reference both the SWF and XML files within my site structure it stops working. The URLs I’m using are server relative so should be okay wherever the files are. Any ideas would be gratefully received! I want to use an XML file rather than declaring the tags in-line, but I have a complicated structure as well…

    Many thanks – it’s a fantastic tool…

    Comment by Steve — September 19, 2009 @ 8:06 pm

  258. Ignore that last comment – I’ve finally got it working – for some reason it’s taken me ages!!!! Put that one down to “user error” LOL.

    Comment by Steve — September 19, 2009 @ 8:08 pm

  259. Hi Roy,
    I found out about your delightful cloud yesterday and implemented it on my website. The tag cloud reminds me of the early days of CDROM’s at the beginning of 90’s.

    Thanks for the open source and have a nice day!

    Mari

    Comment by Mari Soppela — September 22, 2009 @ 6:53 am

  260. Hi I am having an issue with getting the tagcloud continue to move automatically without the need of mouse movement. I set (a) and (b) to fixed values a = 100; and b to b = 200; but it doesnt seem to be working. How can i get it to keep spinning?

    Comment by Allen — September 23, 2009 @ 8:43 pm

  261. Hi, my client wishes to use your tag cloud, and might I say its great but dosent want your name to appear when you right mouse click it, the client is very happy to have you listed on the copyright & contributions page, could we come to a compromise???

    Comment by Peter — September 24, 2009 @ 1:40 pm

  262. Hi Peter. Sure, go ahead an remove that link (you’ll need to edit the flash movie a bit). A replacement credit is much appreciated.

    Comment by Roy — September 24, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

  263. Thankyou, I will ensure you get a credit as menioned in the above post of mine, and make it a hyperlink to the roytanck.com site

    Comment by Peter — September 25, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

  264. Also any way to around the words when you hover over them and they become bold (or bolder) instead??

    Comment by Peter — September 25, 2009 @ 2:17 pm

  265. Hi i’m Sofia from Italy . I’d like tag-cloud very indeed . I’m not a pro with flash so i’m sorry for my dummy question : How can i put a background image in the tag cloud movie? . Thanks for your help !!!

    Comment by sofia — September 25, 2009 @ 10:33 pm

  266. How can I make the system use the tagcloud.xml to get the tags instead of in JS in the actual index.html or index.php

    Comment by Peter — September 26, 2009 @ 1:39 pm

  267. Hi Peter. If you remove the ‘mode’ and ‘tags’ flashvars it’ll look for the XML file as a fallback.

    Comment by Roy — September 27, 2009 @ 12:56 pm

  268. Hi Sofia. The easiest way is probably to set Cumulus to transparent and use CSS to add a background image to the widget (or containing element if you’re not using the widget). That way you’ll be able to upgrade the plugin without the need to re-hack it each time.

    Comment by Roy — September 27, 2009 @ 12:59 pm

  269. Peter, you’d need to edit the Flash movie to change the rollover effect, and using bold would require the bold variant of the font to be included in the movie, which adds over 20 KB.

    Comment by Roy — September 27, 2009 @ 1:07 pm

  270. Hi Roy – Love the cloud – We’ve created an “autotag” version that generates tags and themes from any web page or twitter feed, and puts them in the cloud, ranked as necessary. http://linkky.com/build_your_widget.html for a roll your own version, http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/linkky for the easy install version, and finally Twitter with widgets http://tweet.linkky.com/your_twitter_id_here

    cheers

    Jon

    Comment by Jon — September 30, 2009 @ 3:50 pm

  271. Hello!

    I changed your code for using on my blog, which I wrote by oneself, and successfuly use it now. And wanna only to say THANK YOU for this wonderful app!

    *sorry for my English, I’m from Russia and haven’t got language practice =(

    Comment by Alia — September 30, 2009 @ 9:33 pm

  272. Hi Jon. That looks like a great project. Is it open source too? It looks like this may end up being a ‘derived work’ at some point…

    Comment by Roy — October 1, 2009 @ 9:25 am

  273. Thanks for this fantastic component, I already use it in my blog, but today I also got it to work in the project I am involved in at work. It’s not live yet, but here’s a movie of it. http://bit.ly/4BFnsi

    Thanks for making it open source, it is fun and very easy to extend. Can’t wait to solidify the implementation.

    Comment by Jon Nylander — October 1, 2009 @ 2:39 pm

  274. Hi Roy

    I came across this module/plugin on a joomla based website. Is your Tag Cloud a native 1.5 joomla module/plugin or did the website masters incorporated the coding to their script. I would love a feature like this on my site

    Comment by Gianluca — October 1, 2009 @ 10:48 pm

  275. dont worry roy. thanks

    i searched for Joomla on this thread and found the appropriate site :)

    Comment by Gianluca — October 1, 2009 @ 10:53 pm

  276. Hi Roy, I’m trying to use your cumulus wp on iWeb for Apple. I’m not great at coding at all, and I have managed to get the names of the pages I want, but I can’t change the destination page, I keep getting your website when I click through. There’s a lot of code I don’t even nearly understand to make it link through to what I want to connect with. I so love your little web application and I really want to get it working on my website, but not sure what to do next. Should one of the computer guys at my school be able to help with this?

    Thanks, Andrew

    Comment by Andrew — October 2, 2009 @ 8:27 pm

  277. Hi Roy, thanks for the flash tag cloud… i just created a gallery3 (gallery.menalto.com) plugin based on your WP_Cumulus. The source is available at: http://github.com/gallery/gallery3-contrib/tree/master/modules/tag_cloud/

    Comment by Tim — October 3, 2009 @ 6:26 am

  278. Update to above… played around some more and its now using SWFObject 2.2 and the javascript is wrapped in a jQuery widget to set various objects.

    So now setting it up on a gallery3 pages is as simple as:
    $(“#gTag).gallery_tag_cloud({
    movie: “<url to movie"
    });

    Alternative HTML for when flash not enabled

    Thanks again for a useful and easy to use movie and blazing the trail :-)

    Comment by Tim — October 4, 2009 @ 12:17 am

  279. Hi Andrew, the xml file is pretty self-explanatory. If you use it instead of trying to pass the links through flashvars you should be able to isert the links you want.

    Comment by Roy — October 5, 2009 @ 9:59 am

  280. Hi Roy,
    Great stuff. I’m an absolutely non-coding individual – so far I’ve got the examples for the xml (non wp) in a folder – looks great. Only thing is that nothing happens when I click a link/tag. I also tried to exchange the swf and js files with the latets ones, same result (no effect upon click). I suppose I’m missing something here?

    Thanks in advance :)

    Comment by Dan — October 6, 2009 @ 4:08 pm

  281. Realized I missed Steve G’s comment/resolution in the first round – this made it work. Thanks a lot!

    Comment by Dan — October 7, 2009 @ 10:57 am

  282. Hello Roy I use the cloud on an elgg site. recently we were building multiple pages all containing identical tags, after about the 7th page the cloud stopped working. reinstalled cleared cache, still no joy on restoring the cloud. Would you have an idea what may have happened. If you wish it see the URl is goofbucket. com we use the cloud on the index page left box “What’s on…”

    Jess

    Comment by Jessica — October 8, 2009 @ 9:55 pm

  283. Never mind we removed the multiple tags. Something to think about for you however. we had multiple pages with three identical tags each. This shut down the cloud. 9 pages in total. We removed eahc page one by one; the cloud returned at the removal of 5 of the pages.

    Comment by Jessica — October 8, 2009 @ 11:20 pm

  284. Hi Roy,

    Thanks for making this open source – I have a quick one hopefully, I was wondering is it possible to tilt the cloud on an angle? is it possible to set the rotation of the mousetrap_mc via the Actionscript? If so what would be the quickest way to do so?

    Cheers

    Comment by Monger — October 9, 2009 @ 4:02 am

  285. Hi Monger. Mousetrap_mc captures the mouse cursor and does nothing else. There’s a ‘holder’ mc that contains the cloud, that you should be able to rotate that using actionscript (TagCloud.as).

    Comment by Roy — October 12, 2009 @ 9:37 am

  286. Jessica, I’m glad you worked it out, because it’s probably an elgg related issue, and I wouldn’t have been able to help you with it.

    Comment by Roy — October 12, 2009 @ 9:42 am

  287. Hi Dan, You might need to put things online for the links to work, and its best to use paths that are on the same domain. This avoids running in Flash’s security sandbox policies.

    Comment by Roy — October 12, 2009 @ 9:48 am

  288. Hi Roy,

    Please help me, I m havving problems with some caracters in the TAG cloud text, I am using UTF-8 in my site, so this accept non-latim caracters, I generate the text cloud with an xml file like:

    tags
    a href=”http://www.teste.ru/ruço” target=”_blank” style=”7″ color=”0×000000″ hicolor=”0×000000″>Меню закладок /a
    /tags

    The word “Меню закладок” do not appear in the cloud.

    Could you help me please?

    Thanks so much!
    Rodrigo.

    Comment by Rodrigo — October 13, 2009 @ 2:04 pm

  289. Hi, currently my tagcloud is sitting outside of WP and works fine. I need it to start spinning automatically upon loading in the browser. Can you point me to the right direction to get this working in the script.
    Thanks
    Allen

    Comment by Allen — October 13, 2009 @ 7:03 pm

  290. Hi Allen. You’ll need to edit the code that controls the movement. This is a little too complicated to explain in a comment, but I wanted to point something out. The reason the cloud stops spinning after a while is to free up CPU cycles. On older/slower PCs Cumulus can put quite a bit of strain on the processor, and I think it makes sense to disable rotation when the user isn’t using the tag cloud.

    Comment by Roy — October 14, 2009 @ 10:15 am

  291. Hi Rodrigo. Due to a limitation in Flash, all characters need to be embedded in the movie. The main version supports Latin only, see this tutorial for more info. We’re working on a more flexible solution for future releases.

    Comment by Roy — October 14, 2009 @ 10:19 am

  292. Thanks a lot Roy!

    I am thinking to add all languages to my cloud, do you think it will be very “heavy” (bytes)?

    Thank you!
    Rodrigo.

    ps.: I want give you a tip, in your site, use Addthis.com button to help users save and share posts.

    Comment by Rodrigo — October 14, 2009 @ 2:07 pm

  293. Great tag cloud Roy.

    One thing I can’t work out is to make the cloud stop when an individual tag is hovered over.

    The reason I want this is because when the user mouseovers a tag, a description box below the cloud has it’s text updated using a javascript function. If the cloud keeps moving, then the mouse could be over a different tag and change the text before the user finishes reading it.

    Sam.

    Comment by Sam K — October 14, 2009 @ 9:54 pm

  294. I made a little js file playing with your plugin. It get values to display in the cloud from an internal JS array and/or external elements such as div. Every h1, h2, h3, li element found on the external div will be displayed in the cloud with different sizes. The address of my blog entry is http://www.egw.it/egwblog.asp?area=apriPost&IdPost=120091014235159 while direct download link of js file with examples is here http://www.egw.it/public/EGBlog/Files/1/egca.zip (italian and english readme inside). It’s just a little thing to play a bit nothing extraordinary! Ciao

    Comment by Enrico — October 15, 2009 @ 1:06 pm

  295. Just wanted to give you a big thanks for this. It’s a neat way to visualize tags. I was able to repurpose it for our StackExchange site: http://moms4mom.com/

    Instructions for other StackExchange users are here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1541/how-did-moms4mom-do-that-really-cool-animated-tag-cloud-for-the-recent-tags

    Comment by Scott W. — October 15, 2009 @ 1:09 pm

  296. Hi Roy,

    I really appreciate your work with the rotating cumulus tag cloud. Is there any alternative, where I can mix words and pictures as cloud. I lately saw a “flickr cloud”, but is there a mixing of both possible?

    And if yes, may you send me the link for it?

    Steffen

    Comment by Steffen Pfeiffer — October 15, 2009 @ 1:45 pm

  297. Hi Roy,

    I added all “glyfs” (embeded) availabe and run the flash. Ok, it worked for many types of characters.
    But Chinese/Japanese characters didnt appear, instead of the character it appears some little square.
    I have tried some others fonts, but it didnt work.

    Do you know what is the problem?
    Please help me.

    Thank you so much.
    Rodrigo.

    Comment by Rodrigo — October 16, 2009 @ 1:15 am

  298. Rodrigo, you’ll need to use a font that actually has all these glyphs. There aren’t that many. And please check the size of your swf. Mine turned out to be humongous once all the characters were in..

    Comment by Roy — October 16, 2009 @ 8:43 am

  299. Hi Sam. You could try modifying the code that controls the rotation. I’ve looked into this in the past and didn’t much like the effect.

    Comment by Roy — October 16, 2009 @ 8:47 am

  300. Hi Enrico. This looks pretty interesting. I’ve seen something like this done a while ago, but not nearly as flexible. It might be a good way of extracting the tags from the tag cloud even in WP, because the markup around the tag cloud isn’t always the same, and this could simply get all tags, no matter what. Thanks.

    Comment by Roy — October 16, 2009 @ 8:50 am

  301. Hi Steffen. I’ve experimented with that, and I think it doesn’t look good. The reason the Flickr widget looks OK is that images that are close to eachother on the sphere don’t overlap. If they would, they would “jump in front” when overtaking a neighbor on the z-axis. This looks like a ‘twitch’, not nice. With tags thrown in there’s no way to avoid this from happening, because tags are wider.

    Comment by Roy — October 16, 2009 @ 8:55 am

  302. Hi Roy, thanks again.

    I have tried many fonts, but I didnt find any one with all glyphs.
    If you know any, please tell me.

    Thank you so much!

    Comment by Rodrigo — October 16, 2009 @ 3:07 pm

  303. this is hard, i just want to have the tag cloud to put the names of my favorite artists on my space :(

    Comment by Cristian — October 18, 2009 @ 1:19 am

  304. I remember finding one among Vista’s new fonts. The easiest way is to check the file sizes. Full unicode fonts are huge (tens of MBs at least).

    Comment by Roy — October 20, 2009 @ 9:24 am

  305. Hi Roy, again about glyphs and fonts…. :)

    I have read about using fonts like “_arial” or “_times”, I think it says to Flash to try to find the best font in the user computer.(and the ‘.swf’ will be smaller).

    Did you already tested this kind of font? Do you think that it could work with non-latin characters?

    Thanks a lot again!
    Rodrigo.

    Comment by Rodrigo — October 21, 2009 @ 2:17 pm

  306. Hi Rodrigo. No I haven’t, but I’m pretty sure the result would be disappointing. Non-embedded characters can’t be animated smoothly in Flash 9.

    Comment by Roy — October 22, 2009 @ 12:57 pm

  307. Hi Roy,

    nice plugin! ;)

    My Question… can I use it in blogger.com? If it is possible, how can I do this? My skills in programming are very amateur like.

    Could you help me?

    Thanks!

    Comment by JohnnyDeluxe — October 22, 2009 @ 10:36 pm

  308. Hi Johnny. I think you’re looking for Blogumus.

    Comment by Roy — October 23, 2009 @ 11:48 am

  309. Hi Roy, How come the .swf of WP-Cumulus is over 8x the size of Flickr Widget? (34kb vs. 4kb) Is there any way to make a reduced-size version?

    Also, I saw that you marked these as open-source; I just want to confirm that it is okay to include it within an open-source software package (and of course, crediting you in the code.) Thanks!

    Comment by E — October 26, 2009 @ 8:21 am

  310. Hi Roy.
    can you (or someone else) advice how to translate my tags from php into wp-cumulus javascript?

    Comment by Denis — November 2, 2009 @ 1:59 pm

  311. … or from php into tagcloud.xml …..
    any advice I will apreciate.
    Thanks, Denis

    Comment by Denis — November 2, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

  312. Denis, did you try the example files? There’s an XML based one too.

    Comment by Roy — November 2, 2009 @ 7:20 pm

  313. possible to use in banner ads? All info have to stay in .swf file. (sorry for my bad english)

    Comment by diz — November 3, 2009 @ 4:42 am

  314. Hi Diz. That requires quite a bit of tinkering with the Flash movie. Brave men have tried and failed :) Possible? Yes. Easy? Definitely not.

    Comment by Roy — November 3, 2009 @ 1:27 pm

  315. Hi buddy,

    I’m trying to work with the tag cloud with joomla (joomulus) and it doesn’t let me write any text in tag names where it is RTL language like Hebrew.
    Any ideas how can it present Hebrew over ?

    Cheers

    Comment by Izi — November 4, 2009 @ 12:09 pm

  316. Hi… I wonder if there is any possibility of insert this amazing tag cloud in a Last.fm account..
    i have no great knowledge of this codes but I found this great application and I felt in love…
    thanks for this work

    Comment by Pablo — November 4, 2009 @ 7:28 pm

  317. // Denis
    hi, Roy
    Sure I have your example.
    I mean how to write an xml file from my database? All other is wonderfull. Your Thing is perfect. All I need is to parse my Tags into your TAGCLOUD.XML
    That is.
    // Denis

    Comment by Denis — November 5, 2009 @ 10:53 am

  318. Denis: that’s so specific to your setup that I can’t help you there. Usually, a PHP script is the best way to go about it.

    Comment by Roy — November 5, 2009 @ 12:19 pm

  319. Hey Roy,

    Working on this for the past 48 hours and facing a dead end now, any ideas? I’d pay for this if requested.

    p.s. you are doing a gr8 work.

    Comment by Izi — November 6, 2009 @ 10:57 am

  320. Hi Izi. Could you please use the comment form on this website to tell me exactly what it is you need? I’ll see if I can help.

    Comment by Roy — November 6, 2009 @ 4:52 pm

  321. Hi Roy,

    very simple: I need cumulus on Joomla (joomulus) to work with Hebrew text presented instead of English.
    I installed joomulus and can’t manage to present any Hebrew font on my website. I added you to my skype contact list, please acknowledge so we can discuss this issue in depth.

    Thank you

    Izi

    Comment by Izi — November 9, 2009 @ 10:24 am

  322. Hi, I really love your plugin but can’t have it work properly on my web site. Someone made a product in order to make an integration within vbulletin, a discussion forum. For them, it seems to work without any problem. For me, it worked the first time but stopped working just a few hours after, without any reason. I did not change anything else on my forum after installing this. Yesterday, I was playing a little bit, trying to find out why I had problems so I tried changing the way I would make it display on my forum by using instead of and the tagcloud showed again. But, a few minutes after, it disappeared again! I have no clue why. (For your information, it’s not only me or my browser since all forum members experiment the same thing.

    It uses two files swfobject.js and tagcloud.swf plus some coding the guy made in order to integrate everything.

    On my forum, I can see the space that the tagcloud is supposed to take, I am even able to right click and see that a flash is there but no tagcloud is showing! You have my website (it was required when I wrote this message) so if you look at the bottom of all pages, in the middle, you will see what I mean, There is a large blank space.

    I have no coding knowledge at all so I need help to understand why it does not work anymore and try to make it work. I hope you can give me a hint.

    Comment by Cleo — November 12, 2009 @ 5:20 pm

  323. A part of my last message was cutted out (I think because I used codes). I said: “by using instead of”. It should have been: “by using the varaible div align instead center”

    Comment by Cleo — November 12, 2009 @ 5:23 pm

  324. And if I look at the page source, the tags are all there! It just does not show up anymore. It came back showing again today for a while and disappeared again… Very weird. It’s like showing intermittently but most of the time not showing up at all. When the cloud is not showing, I only see a large space where the could should be.

    Comment by Cleo — November 12, 2009 @ 9:21 pm

  325. Hi Cleo. I’m afraid you’ll have to contact the author of the vbulletin port. The code in your page looks OK, but the tags have not been urlencoded like WP-Cumulus does. This could be the cause of your issue, but it can only be resolved in the vbulletin code.

    Comment by Roy — November 13, 2009 @ 8:51 am

  326. Hey there Roy, we spoke about a week ago on twitter, I’m having trouble linking the cloud to anchors. When I put into the tagcloud.xml (like so: a href=”pagename.html#anchor”) all that happens when the link is clicked in the cloud is that it goes to the page, not to the anchor on the page.

    Any suggestions?

    Comment by Ashley — November 14, 2009 @ 7:25 pm

  327. Hi Roy – thanks for this amazing plug-in. Fantastic. I don’t know if someone has already posted this or not, but I created a non-blog version using a PHP form for real-time polling. I’ve posted the code as a template in case anyone is interested in using or re-purposing it. The SQL/tables will need to be customized of course…

    PHP: http://dimitridarras.com/tag_cloud_php_sql.zip

    Here is the demo: http://dimitridarras.com/tag_cloud_php/form.php

    Comment by Dimitri — November 15, 2009 @ 6:20 am

  328. Hi Ashley. I assume the anchor is also missing from the url in the browser’s address bar? I’ll be working in the link code later today, and I’ll see if I can look into this.

    Comment by Roy — November 15, 2009 @ 1:56 pm

  329. Indeed it is. I didn’t even notice that :P
    Looking forward to what you can come up with =]

    Ashley

    Comment by Ashley — November 15, 2009 @ 4:53 pm

  330. Hi Ashley. It looks like hashes are being malformed somehow. Are you using urlencoding for your tag cloud? I have no issues if I don’t it seems. How exactly do the urls look after clicking a tag?

    Comment by Roy — November 15, 2009 @ 7:56 pm

  331. I don’t think I’m using urlencoding, i’m kinda new to dreamweaver, so I don’t know if it’s doing it automatically

    So I’ll click on a tag, and it will take me to //D:/foldername/pagename.html
    instead of pagname.html#anchor

    Comment by Ashley — November 15, 2009 @ 8:42 pm

  332. Ashley, I experimented a little with it last night, and working from the example files available in this post, anchors were handled correctly. Did you try putting your files online? That sometimes makes the difference with Flash.

    Comment by Roy — November 16, 2009 @ 11:43 am

  333. *Update* It would appear that using the ‘#’ encoding ‘%23′ works in IE, but not on firefox.

    Comment by Ashley — November 16, 2009 @ 11:48 am

  334. Actually, don’t worry about it, I’m sure I can figure it out when I get home :P
    And I’ll try hosting some of my files on the internet and see if that solves the problem.

    Once again, much oblidged for all the help you’ve given me =]

    Ashley

    Comment by Ashley — November 16, 2009 @ 11:51 am

  335. I think you are mistaken about the possibility of this being XHTML strict. I’ve yet to see one implementation that is validating. Any one have a cumulus cloud that validates as XHTML Strict 1.0 that I can look at?

    I’ve tried urlencode and escape and encodeURIComponent and <tag>. The is such a bother, why is it so important that it be there for the cloud to work?

    Can anyone give me a link of a working cloud that validates XHTML strict?

    Comment by Austin — November 20, 2009 @ 12:09 am

  336. Hi Roy, your tag cloud is awesome! I’d like to use it in Dreamweaver but I can’ t see any reference on how to use it. Do you mind explaining how I can do that? Is it possible to put my own keywords instead of him looking for tags?

    Comment by Vince — November 20, 2009 @ 8:15 pm

  337. Hi Roy! Thanks for sharing this nice code!

    Would it be possible to reload the xml data via a setinterval call?

    Thank you,

    Felipe

    Comment by Felipe Ceglia — November 23, 2009 @ 4:27 pm

  338. Hi Felipe. Yes, that would be possible with a bit of tinkering. But in AS3, you’d have to use the Timer class :) . I’ve never tried this, but if you move the loading parts out of the constructor and into a function you can periodically call it should work. Things would get more complicated if you’d want to preserve tag positions and such.

    Comment by Roy — November 24, 2009 @ 9:31 am

  339. Hi Vince. Did you download the example files? Do they open correctly in DreamWeaver? With both the xml and non-xml versions you’re free to enter the ‘tags’ yourself, so you can change them to anything you like.

    Comment by Roy — November 24, 2009 @ 9:40 am

  340. Hi Roy, thank you very much for your help! I downloaded the file loaded the movie into the page and it works fine. Just need to put more space between keywords.
    Once again thank you very much indeed!

    Comment by Vince — November 24, 2009 @ 6:23 pm

  341. Love the Cumulus, such a cool menu… trying to incorporate it into a site, but having some minor issues.

    I am using the non-wp flash version of the cumulus menu, but seem to be having problems with word spacing. The words bunch up at random and don’t appear to be evenly spaced. Anything you can suggest to help ? Thanks.

    Comment by Kurt — November 24, 2009 @ 8:18 pm

  342. Hi Kurt, Vince. If you set the ‘distr’ flashvar to ‘true’ it’ll use even spacing.

    Comment by Roy — November 24, 2009 @ 8:36 pm

  343. Hi Roy

    Thank you very much again for your support. I cannot find that “If you set the ‘distr’ flashvar to ‘true’ it’ll use even spacing”

    Is it possible to change the example xml files with a black background and white tags and change the font style?

    Thank you

    Comment by vince — November 26, 2009 @ 5:22 pm

  344. Hi Vince. Both example html files have ‘distr’ enabled by default, so my guess is this si as good as it gets. Are you using a lot of tags? 45 seems to be a good maximum.

    And yes, you can change the colors by editing the value of ‘tcolor’, and changing the movie’s background color (currently ‘#ffffff’). The font is fixed.

    Comment by Roy — November 27, 2009 @ 3:05 pm

  345. Hi Roy
    Thank you for your reply. I am using the xml files and cannot find the variable to modify in it only the tags. I saved the swfobject and xml files in the directory of the site and embedded the flash movie in the page. Which one I should modify to change the colors?

    Comment by vince — November 27, 2009 @ 4:15 pm

  346. The colors, and all the other flashvars are in the html file.

    Comment by Roy — November 27, 2009 @ 4:35 pm

  347. Hi again,
    thanks for your great support Roy. I easily managed to create my custom cumulus upload the package and put the link on my blog. Now I just don’t understand how to embed the movie in a post. What have I exactly to copy in the post ? I tried to copy the whole content of the html file with no result (with absolute or relative paths to the movie)… I dont’t wan’t to use the [wp-cumulus] tag as I don’t use your script as a real tag-cloud plugin.
    Thanks again ;)

    Comment by Sdenim — November 29, 2009 @ 11:39 pm

  348. Hi Roy
    I didn’t use the html but xml files. Should I include the html file in the directory of the site as well? I changed the color in the html files but the movie come up with original colors

    Comment by vince — November 30, 2009 @ 7:22 pm

  349. Hi Vince. I assume you’re loading the html file into a browser? If the flashvars get passed correctly the colors should change. That how it works with the WordPress plugin. You should have at least four files in your folder. SWFObject.js, the html file, tagcloud.xml (holds the tags) and tagcloud.swf.

    Comment by Roy — December 1, 2009 @ 10:58 am

  350. Hi Roy
    Thank you for your reply! Sorry to bother you again. I have the 4 files in the same directory/folder and the flash movie is also embed in the page but it doesn’t change colors while the html file does when I loaded in the browser. Any clues?

    Comment by vince — December 1, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

  351. Hi Roy, Thanks for your reply!

    Regarding this:

    “But in AS3, you’d have to use the Timer class :) . I’ve never tried this, but if you move the loading parts out of the constructor and into a function you can periodically call it should work.”

    Would you have any example? I am not too fluent in javascript lingo!

    If it where possible to save tags positions, that would be even more awesome!

    Thanks,

    Felipe

    Comment by Felipe Ceglia — December 1, 2009 @ 7:36 pm

  352. Felipe, I’m sorry, but no, I don not have example files, nor can I free up enough time to make them.

    Comment by Roy — December 2, 2009 @ 9:40 am

  353. Vince, could you zip up the files and email them to me? ( firstname.lastname[at]gmail.com ). I’ll have a look.

    Comment by Roy — December 2, 2009 @ 9:41 am

  354. Hi Roy
    Thank you very much for your amazing support. I managed to make it work. I copied the html of the sample file into my homepage.
    Thank you very much again.

    Comment by vince — December 4, 2009 @ 1:08 pm

  355. re: Even Distribution

    the ‘distr’ flashvar is set to ‘true’ but the spacing is not even or distributed.

    It seems random and usually clumped together.
    I am not using very many tags, less that a dozen.
    Is there nothing I can do to make it more even ?

    Thanks again.

    Comment by Kurt — December 4, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

  356. Kurt, can you point me to a url so I can have a look?

    Comment by Roy — December 4, 2009 @ 10:04 pm

  357. Yes, thank you.

    it is joadcycle.com

    Comment by Kurt — December 5, 2009 @ 3:46 am

  358. Kurt, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Flash detection script you’re using, but I see no flashvars at all being passed to the movie. I think you should put a line like this in the code:

    ‘flashvars’, ‘distr=true’

    Somewhere around line 350, with all the other settings.

    Comment by Roy — December 8, 2009 @ 9:07 am

  359. when I put the line 350 in:

    ‘flashvars’, ‘distr=true’

    The cloud doesn’t load.

    Comment by Kurt — December 8, 2009 @ 10:30 am

  360. This is the code from the dev version.

    Comment by Kurt — December 8, 2009 @ 10:41 am

  361. OK I got it… looks like I was using the wrong script.
    Iwas making it harder than it needed to be.
    Thanks again for your help and your awesome menu :)

    Kurt

    Comment by Kurt — December 8, 2009 @ 2:24 pm

  362. Hi roy… Very nice developement. But i want one help. how to reduce the space between
    two text. plz help me

    Comment by Prabhakaran — December 14, 2009 @ 2:04 pm

  363. The space between tags is either determined at random (distr=false) or by the number of tags (distr=true). You could make the font size better if you’d like them to look like they’re closer together.

    Comment by Roy — December 14, 2009 @ 8:19 pm

  364. Hi Roy,

    Thanks so much for this function. It looks amazing. I had no problem with implementing on my web page. I changed the color and hi color of particular words :)

    I put the url of the destination of the word that I wanted in the a href tag, but it stopped the cloud from working? Could you help explain how to have the words links directed to specific urls? Thanks so much

    Comment by Josh — December 15, 2009 @ 12:42 am

  365. sorry Roy,

    it seems to be working now. must have erased part of the href or something?? Thansk

    Comment by Josh — December 15, 2009 @ 1:09 am

  366. Thank you for this code! Check it out on my Web site.

    Comment by GargantulaKon — December 25, 2009 @ 9:59 pm

  367. Hi Roy!
    Your Clod plug-ins is awesome! Thank you!
    Last night I finally managed their location on the left side-bar of our wordpress website. It’s working now, great! We really appreciate very much your work and your support! Have the most fascinating year with all it’s love, peace, happiness and success! GHH Team.

    Comment by Olga — January 3, 2010 @ 11:57 am

  368. Hey, I’m not all that great at web design and development but I have WP-Cumulus and it’s associated files sitting here and I want to put them on my plain HTML site. (It’s not using anything like PHP or MySql.) I don’t really know how to do this and the readme isn’t much help either. I see people here are talking about it, but from the comments above, I can’t get the jist of how to implement it onto my site.

    If I’m looking in the wrong place or you have the solution to hand, please E-Mail me. :D I’ve wanted to get WP-Cumulus for my site since I first saw it a while back.

    Thanks,
    Duncan Davey of Soharix

    Comment by Cowbox — January 4, 2010 @ 1:09 am

  369. Cowbox, did you try the example files available for download on this page? They use plain html, no PHP and an XML file for the tags.

    Comment by Roy — January 6, 2010 @ 11:40 am

  370. Ah, I didn’t see those.

    Either way, I got it working after looking through the HTML source on someone’s website and finding the section for WP Cumulus. :)

    Thanks anyway.

    Comment by Cowbox — January 6, 2010 @ 5:48 pm

  371. Do you have an updated example using swfobject 2.2?
    It only seems to work with swfobject 1.4 or 1.5.
    The error we get is: SWFObject not defined.

    Comment by Webmind — January 7, 2010 @ 1:31 pm

  372. Hi, thanks for this great tool!

    Did anybody try to stop the motion of the cloud so that a specific tag would move to the center of the flash film by clicking on it? (not opening a hyperlink on click)

    Roy, do you know if this is possible?

    I want to select a tag by clicking it and automatically center it in the front. After the tag is positioned I want to fade in additional information for each tag so that it is readable without having the problem that everything moves.

    At the moment i fade in the information but I can’t figure out how to move a specific tag to the center front and stop the movement of the cloud(with all the other tags in the right position).
    Looks like I have to set the values a and b manually in the updateTags() function?

    Cheers
    steff

    Comment by steff — January 7, 2010 @ 7:47 pm

  373. Hi Roy,

    Thanks for the great work here..I’m designing a news website and would like to use your flash animation to display some keywords..the only problem we have is its scale..The section on our site is like 700*200, can you help on this please.

    Many thanks!

    Cheers,
    Dan

    Comment by Daniel Pepper — January 8, 2010 @ 7:04 pm

  374. Daniel, the way the movie scales itself is by taking the shortest side (200 in your case) and resizing the tag cloud to fit that side. If the area is 700 pixels wide, most of the space to the left and right won’t be used. Alternative are to chop off tags (requires code changes insie the Flash movie), or make the cloud elliptical.

    Comment by Roy — January 10, 2010 @ 10:45 am

  375. Hi Roy, how are you doing? I hope you’re doing well. First of all thanks for the wp-cumulus plugin, it’s a really nice and fun way to display tags…

    I have one doubt that I would be very grateful if you could help me, it’s about random tags.

    For more than 2 months I noticed the new tags I posted were not showing in the WP-Cumulus. Reading through Wordpress.org forum I found this post:

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/244657?replies=7

    There you answered the same question I’m asking here saying that on the widgets box “wp_tag_cloud parameters” I should write “order=RAND”.

    I tried it, and as I’m kind of new in the html world I tried with 3 different writings:

    order=RAND
    ‘order=RAND’
    “order=RAND”

    I hoped it would solve my needing of random tags each time the blog is accessed but nothing happened and I still have the same tags from the beginning of my blog without any changes on the WP-Cumulus.

    What am I doing wrong?

    Thanks in advance,

    Marlos

    Comment by Marlos — January 12, 2010 @ 12:09 am

  376. Hi marlos. I believe I also noted that I had not tried it myself. I’m not familiar with how wp_tag_cloud works internally. Does it first select the tags and then randomize the order within the selection, or does it first randomize and then pick the first 45 (default)? Recent experiments have shown that in all likelihood, the first happens. And since WP-Cumulus will randomize the tags anyway, adding order=RAND probably does nothing.

    I’m afraid there’s no way to randomize the tags. I’m considering skipping wp_tag_cloud in future version, but that may take a while because it adds a lot of complexity to the plugin.

    Comment by Roy — January 13, 2010 @ 1:11 pm

  377. Hi,

    I’ve been using your cloud outside Wordpress for a while now and don’t update frequently. This morning, I tried to add some tags. I copied and pasted a few lines inside the tagcloud.xml file that I use as a source. The tags don’t show in the cloud. I guess I need to reset the cloud to have it read the list again but I have no idea how to do that. A hint would be great. Thanks and best regards.
    Two years later, everytime I go back to my site, I think the cloud really looks great.

    Comment by François Mottaz — January 19, 2010 @ 11:44 am

  378. Hey Roy,

    Thanks for making this open source – it’s beautiful.

    Like the millions of others in the comments above, I am merely a human trying to implement the work of a god (that’s you).

    I am trying to use the word cloud in my own flash application. (tried loading the .swf with actionscript, tried using TagCloud as a class – nothing is working)

    My troubleshooting led me to this: when I open the Developer’s package you supply, there is already a tagcloud.swf file in the ‘flash sources’ folder. This .swf works fine with ‘example_xml.html’

    However, as a test I opened tagcloud.fla and immediately Export or Publish it (without making any changes) to regenerate the .swf. The resulting tagcloud.swf does not work with ‘example_xml.html’! Crazy, right?!

    Is something wrong with the tagcloud.fla in the developer folder? If not, why might this be happening?

    Any insight would be much appreciated, as I’ve been troubleshooting for a long long time.

    Cheers,
    Robert

    Comment by Robert — January 20, 2010 @ 7:19 am

  379. Robert, are you on a mac? Sometimes Font names are different on OSX, so you might need to adjust the font used in the text field and specified in the Tag.as class.

    Comment by Roy — January 21, 2010 @ 9:14 am

  380. François, I have no idea. There’s no limit to the number of tags in the movie (there is a default restriction of 45 in WP’s tag cloud function, but that doesn’t apply here). The XML tends to get cached, so I usually enter its url in a browser and refresh it using ctrl-f5. That helps sometimes.

    Comment by Roy — January 21, 2010 @ 9:32 am

  381. Roy – this tagcloud thing is really awesome. I’ve got it working on a regular HTML site in development (no WP) but I am running into a problem. When I call the addvariable method and pass the tags with a full URL (e.g. href=’http://www.whateversite.com/thepage.html’), it works fine. But if I try to change it to just href=’thepage.html’, the tagcloud words are not “clickable”. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue? Thanks in advance.

    Comment by ttemple — January 21, 2010 @ 9:26 pm

  382. ttemple, this is because of a security restriction I put in the swf file. It only handles links that start with ‘http’. I’ll admit that this isn’t the most elegant solution, but it causes no issues with WordPress, and protects the movie from javascript and vbscript link injection. You can easily removie this if you’re familiar with Flash, but I would recommend you replace it with some other filter.

    Comment by Roy — January 22, 2010 @ 11:07 am

  383. Hey Roy,
    thx for make this repurposable.

    Im using Ruby on Rails and really, really like this thing. Im thinking on writing a plugin for making tag-clouds including this, or try to extend an existing plugin with it. So, im asking myself, under which license you published your amazing tag-cloud ?

    Most plugins for Rails are published under MIT-license, so everybody could use them for whatever he likes. Is there a way to include your tag-cloud ( of course with references to you ) into an MIT-licensed project ?

    Thanks for your time. Feel free to contact me via eMail if you like.

    Greetz,
    Nils

    Comment by Nils — January 22, 2010 @ 2:52 pm

  384. Roy,

    Thanks for your suggestion! I am indeed using OSX, but the font name “Arial” is the same for both Mac and PC. It seems that the only line of code it doesn’t like is the embed: _tf.embedFonts = true;

    I wonder why this line doesn’t work on OSX?

    Anyways, without the embed line, everything works – so thanks a million!

    Comment by Robert — January 22, 2010 @ 5:28 pm

  385. Robert, without embedded font the animation probably doesn’t look as good, and there may be font issues on computers other than yours. If I remember correctly, there’s an issue with the Arial in WP-Cumulus being set to bold, and not using the mac’s “Arial Bold” font.

    Comment by Roy — January 24, 2010 @ 4:51 pm

  386. Hi Nils, I’m afraid that’s a bit tricky. The MIT license is a lot less strict than the GPL is, and if you’d release the movie’s souce code as MIT, this opens it up to more types of usage then I’d like to permit. Please email me so we can discuss options.

    Comment by Roy — January 24, 2010 @ 4:55 pm

  387. Hi Roy,

    This question was already posted before, but I am encountering the same ‘problem’… Do you have an ActionScript 2.0 version of this? One that uses script in the time line rather than an external file?

    That would be great. The tag cloud looks beautiful.

    Comment by René — January 26, 2010 @ 2:00 pm

  388. Rene, I do have an AS2 version, but it has no time line. All the animation is scripted, and the only file loaded externally is the XML with the tags (unless you’re using flashvars). Email me if you’d like a copy to look at, but be warned that its code is not very clean.

    Comment by Roy — January 26, 2010 @ 2:48 pm

  389. Hi Roy ;)
    Many many thanks for your script and for sharing it freely with all us.
    That’s what I call innovation, really grat job.
    Everything works just perfect, I downloaded, tested and make it work GREAT in about 15 minutes.
    I’m not using WP.
    Best regards and I wish you to have an extraordinary business career and a super fat wallet ;) LOL

    Comment by OMG — January 27, 2010 @ 9:37 am

  390. I have a comment regarding accessibility. I know that Flash is inherently accessible now – making all text available to screen readers. But I can’t seem to use my TAB key to actually get to the tag cloud and tab through every link in the cloud. I’ve tried both the javascript implementation and the object implementation, but although the curser seems to land on the Flash app, I can’t do anything but tab off of it.

    Thoughts?

    Thanks – great app!

    KEv

    Comment by Kevin Burke — February 2, 2010 @ 4:26 pm

  391. Hi Kevin. Last time I checked, Flash still didn’t properly report links and text loaded into the movie and/or in elements created after the movie started. Both these things are true for the tags in WP-Cumulus. However, the plugin does output the regular tag cloud as well, albeit hidden through CSS. I assume this makes the links visible in screen readers and such? As for using tab, I’ll see if I can implement that into the Flash movie.

    Comment by Roy — February 3, 2010 @ 3:14 pm

  392. Roy, it appears the method of implementing the tag cloud matters vis-a-vis accessibility. Now I haven’t delved into this to any great depth, but when implemented in a static web page (i.e. not in WP) with javascript, one can tab to the cloud in IE, but Firefox skips over it. Neither allow interaction with it. When implemented with Firefox skips over it. IE allows tabbing onto it but no further interaction. But when implemented with , while Firefox skips over it, IE lands on the first link in the cloud and allows tabbing to each word. See the following implementation using an IE browser and pressing tab until you get to the cloud: http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/08/blogumus-flash-animated-label-cloud-for.html

    Comment by Kevin Burke — February 4, 2010 @ 9:28 pm

  393. I missed a word in my post (above). The last example uses:

    KEv

    Comment by Kevin Burke — February 4, 2010 @ 9:33 pm

  394. One more time …

    embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”tagcloud.swf”

    KEv

    Comment by Kevin Burke — February 4, 2010 @ 9:34 pm

  395. Hi Kevin. The embed tag is outdated and non-standard (not part of the official html definition). We’re using the SWFObject library for WP-Cumulus, and will be moving to its latest version in the next release. I’m not sure how that will affect tabbing, but it’s the most advanced and standards-compliant way of embedding Flash. It handles plugin detection, alternate content and its code validates as xhtml. I’ll test how tabs works when test versions of 2.0 become available.

    Comment by Roy — February 5, 2010 @ 8:52 am

  396. Hi Roy,

    this tag cloud is awesome! Sad to say, i have little problem with encoding. I need to show letters like Ř, Č and so on, (not all in uppercase) but in flash is no character instead of this strange symbols. I opened fla file and replace fonts with my own from windows, but I have English version of OS, so it doesn’t work out.

    Can you help me, please?

    Comment by Kostkac — February 5, 2010 @ 11:04 am

  397. Kostkac, this will not be necessary in future version, but the current one needs work to display non-western characters. A tutorial is here.

    Comment by Roy — February 5, 2010 @ 2:34 pm

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