Review of Popular WordPress Plugins: WP-Cumulus

Posted on 10 November 2008 by LizzyFin

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If you display tags or categories in a sidebar of your WordPress blog, you might like to take a look at the WP-Cumulus plugin. It gets 5 stars by all the reviewers so far and definitely hits the top on the cool factor.

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories but in a visually-striking way. A rotating cloud of words is presented instead of a plain old list.

Here’s an example of WP-Cumulus in action:

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WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.

Move your cursor over the display and the rotation will change direction and speed. Click on a word once it has a box around it to get a listing of posts containing that tag or filed in that category. Pretty cool, eh?

The only caution here is that you must be running WP 2.3 or later. WP-Cumulus will not work with earlier versions.

Installation follows the typical plugin format. Simply download the plugin, unpack it, and FTP the plugin folder, called wp-cumulus, to your wp-content/plugins directory.

There are three ways to display your WP-Cumulus cloud:

  • In a page or post like above, using the key [WP-CUMULUS]. Features can be modified under Settings/WP-Cumulus.
  • In your theme anywhere that you insert <?php wp_cumulus_insert(); ?>, probably in a sidebar. Just make sure the sidebar is big enough to display the cloud nicely.
  • As a widget, via ‘Design’->’Widgets’. Edit the widget to modify the size of the cloud and the colors used for the text and background.

Really nice, don’t you think?

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