I hate having to do this, but I’m going to be closing the comments on most of the WP-Cumulus related posts on this blog. Because some have several hundred comments, they’ve become impossible to read and I find that the same questions keep getting asked over and over again. I’ve tried to patiently answer all of them, but I’m no longer able to keep up. Blog comments just aren’t a very good support mechanism.

If your question is about WP-Cumulus, the original WordPress plugin, not one of its ports or variations, please post it in the WordPress forums. This allows others to find the answers, and chances are your question has been discussed already. The forums are an invaluable resource, and offer a much better platform for WP-Cumulus support. If you add the “wp-cumulus” tag to your thread, I’ll almost certainly see it.

I’ll also try to update the FAQ more often. It’s a little out of date, but definitely still a good place to start. Oh, and for more info, see my support page.

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WP-Cumulus has been ported to quite a few other platforms. I keep bumping into it, often on sites not running WordPress. I’ve given up trying to post about all of these spin-off projects, but this one feels a little special. Gautam Gupta has created a bbPress version. As far as I’m aware this is the first port to another Automattic project (I’m still waiting for a wordpress.com ‘port’, come on Matt ).

So, if you want your forum tags to fly like your blog tags, head over to http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-cumulus/ for the download.

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The one feature I’ve always wanted to add to WP-Cumulus is true unicode support. Flash player 9 made this impossible because it needed to have the font characters embedded into the movie, and unicode fonts are simply too big for that. But with Flash 10, Adobe has introduced new ways of handling text, and those now allow for non-embedded text to be animated quite smoothly. There’s also no longer any need to specify an exact font name, you can simply tell the player to get a sans-serif font. Flash player 10 is on over 93% of computers now, so it starts to make sense to use it to finally add this long-awaited feature to WP-Cumulus.

I’ve created a test movie (above) that uses these new features, and I’m anxious to find out if it works for you, especially if you’re in Asia, Russia or anywhere else with a non-Latin character set.

What are you seeing?

• Are you seeing all 45 tags (approximately), in many languages?
• Are you seeing your (non-Latin) language?
• Any other issues?
• Do you want me to add your language to the test? Post the language name here.

Please leave a comment below and tell me if the movie works as it should. Thanks!

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A few weeks ago I rushed out an update to fix a potentially dangerous Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in WP-Cumulus. With the PHP part of the plugin shielded from ‘outside use’, I was hoping no more issues would pop up. Still, I’m glad MustLive alerted me to another issue that uses the Flash movie itself. The exploit worked by calling the SWF file directly, and supplying link with javascript. I’m not quite sure how dangerous this is, but I’ve modified the movie so it only executes regular links.

Please update your copy of WP-Cumulus to 1.23 asap. For most users it should only take two clicks.

The should not affect how WP-Cumulus works on WordPress blogs. But there have been a number of ports and other projects that use the Flash movie. I urge the authors of those projects to examine the new Flash movie, and see if it still works in/with their product. The exploit is not unique to WordPress, and they may need to modify the security check to fit their project.

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Over the last few months, I’ve not been able to dedicate as much time to the WP-Cumulus project as I’d hoped to. Freelance work has been keeping me pretty busy, and I’ve had to deal with acute issues rather than be able to focus on new features. That’s why I decided to look for help. Just around that time, Luke Morton launched a spin-off version of the plugin that implemented something I’d been meaning to work on too. I contacted Luke and I’m very happy he’s agreed to help develop WP-Cumulus from now on.

Some of the things we’ll be working on are pretty major. We’ll finally move to SWFObject 2.x, look into internationalization (both for the plugin and the Flash movie) and make improvements to the admin screen. We hope to be able to release a true 2.0 version sometime this year.

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Yesterday, Thomas Scholz alerted me to a security weakness in WP-Cumulus. He noticed XSS hacking attempts targeted at wp-cumulus.php that could, in rare cases allow malicious code to be executed. This issue has been fixed in version 1.22, and I strongly recommend you upgrade straight away. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and the attack has already been seen ‘in the wild’.

WP-Cumulus can be downloaded here, but chances are your blog will notify you of the new version and allow you to upgrade automatically.

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I guess it was about time I updated my Tagnetic Poetry plugin. WP-Cumulus’ lesser known brother now has shortcode support, as well as several other improvements. It’s not as mature as Cumulus, but it’s definitely stable enough to deserve a 1.0 version number.

The Flash movie now has support for the ‘xmlpath’ flashvar that WP-Cumulus has supported for a while now. This affects you only if you’re attempting to use it outside of the context of WordPress, but is very handy if you do. Putting more than one instance of the plugin on a page should also no longer cause issues, and several other little issues were fixed.

Using shortcodes allows you to place TP all over your blog. The parameters allow you to control the way it looks per instance, as opposed to the one set of options the plugin used to have. Those will still be used as defaults, but you can override them if you like by adding attributes to the [tagneticpoetry] shortcode. Here are some examples of how that works:

The new shortcode is all lowercase, but the older [TAGNETICPOETRY] tag is still supported for backwards compatibility. You could in fact add lowercase attributes to it if you’re using WordPress 2.5 or higher, but if you’re going to be editing the page anyway I guess it makes sense to use the lowercase code instead.

Currently, Tagnetic Poetry supports these attributes:

A more detailed blog post on how to use shortcodes is here. The original post about Tagnetic Poetry is here.

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It’s getting hard to keep track of all the projects that are based on my little WordPress plugin. The most recent two are ports to MediaWiki and ReloadCMS. The latter is documented (in Russian) on opensoft.110mb.com and maintained by Victor Nabatov. My Russian is pretty poor, but I can see Cumulus tumbling about on the sidebar, so I guess it works

The MediaWiki port is listed as being beta, but the demonstration works beautifully. If I understand correctly it displays the categories on your wiki using ‘my’ Flash movie. Now if only they’d install it on Wikipedia… that would be so cool .

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A while ago I was asked to do a Flex version of WP-Cumulus. Because I don’t know the first thing about Flex, I failed miserably . But the fun thing about open source software is that anyone with the right skills can pick things up and create the version they need. Carlos Carvalha did just that and did a Flex version for use with Drupal. If Flex is your thing, you can download the files from Carlos’ page. Because this is a ‘modified version’ of my WordPress plugin, it is automatically licensed under GPL, and is thus free for you to use.

Carlos’ blog is pretty interesting btw. Definitely the first blog theme I’ve seen that’s built entirely in Flash.

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It’s been a while since I released the last version of WP-Cumulus. I’ve been very busy with client work, but there were a few important little fixes and features I wanted to release. The most requested of those probably is that the Flash movie now supports the ‘target’ attribute. I’ve also made the XML path (from which the XML file is loaded) configurable. Both these features are of use only to people not using WordPress, but they were requested so frequently that I decided to add them in.

There’s also a new option to not hide the regular HTML tag cloud. WP-Cumulus outputs this as part of the ‘alternate content’ shown to people without Flash. But because the HTML cloud is usually larger (in display size) than the Flash one, some users were experiences a nasty ‘twitch’ when the alternate content was replaced through javascript. You can now choose to keep hiding it (default), or not it using the new option. Not hiding the HTML cloud may be beneficial in terms of SEO, and offers users without Flash the option to use tags. Oh and the widget title is now optional as well. If you don’t enter anything, no title will be displayed. This was requested by quite a few people as well.

If you’re using WP-Cumulus, please upgrade to 1.21.

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