Cumulus Word Cloud

One of the thing I have to say I love the most with WordPress is the plugin functions. It’s so easy to install new plugins so it’s almost silly, so therefore I’m trying out a few new plugins every month to see what kind of nice things people have come up with.

One of the plugins I found this way is the WP-Cumulus plugin created by Roy Tanck. This plugin is a flash based word could taking all your categories, tags or both and create an animated cloud of words.

[WP-CUMULUS]

Move your mouse pointer over the cloud to change direction and speed of the words

From the settings page for the plugin you can set your own text colors and you can even have gradient colors (i.e. you set two colors and the text will show up as one of the two or a mix). In the above example I’m using #336699 and #339966. If you need help finding the hexadecimal codes for the colors you want to use you can check out the color converter at html.xaviermedia.com.

You can change the look of your cloud in several ways for example if you only want to show a few of your categories or tags you can select to have maybe lets say the 15 most popular in the cloud. You can also decide on the font sizes for the larges and the smallest words and many more things.

To show the word could you just add this tag in any post or any page:

[ WP-CUMULUS ]

You can also use a PHP tag directly in your template to show the word could:

<?php $tag = wp_tag_cloud('format=array' );?>

This way you can use different settings for the word cloud in your template from the word cloud you may show in for example blog posts.

To get this plugin please have a look at WordPress.org.