Ever since I released the first version of WP-Cumulus, people have been asking me for color support. While I agreed that multi-colored tags would probably help make Cumulus look even better, there were a few obstacles to overcome.
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I just checked the download stats on the WP-Cumulus page at wordpress.org, and saw that the plugin has been downloaded over ten thousand times. Unfortunately, I have no idea how many people downloaded it from this blog before I moved it to the WordPress server, but the total number of users is probably even higher.
10,000 downloads is insignificant when compared to the hundreds of thousands downloads registered for some other plugins, but i’m pretty excited that so many people have taken the time to give WP-Cumulus a try.
This is a first for me. Even though I’ve always been a firm believer in the open source licensing model, I’ve never actually released anything as free software. Up until now. As of ten minutes ago, WP-Cumulus is open source. From now on the plugin will be hosted on WordPress.org, and I will no longer offer it for download here on my own website. But that’s just the start of it.
Because it’s now open source, the source files for the Flash movie are also available for download for you to tinker with. This means you’ll be able to change the font, embed your language’s character set and change anything else you feel beneficial for your blog. If you improve on the plugin’s functionality, please let me know so I can consider adding your changes.
Have fun!
I’ve just uploaded a new version of WP-Cumulus. Version 1.03 attemps to fix compatibility issues, adds a widget, speed control and several other little things. See here for the changelog.
Update
With the help of Mujahid (and several others), I’ve been able to track down the cause of the “it kills my blog” error. I turns out I was closing PHP’s output buffer once too often, which PHP version 5.2 and newer does not like very much. All should be well for these users with version 1.04. Can’t tell you how relieved I am.
I’ve updated my Youtuber plugin to include an options page. This allows you to much more easily adjust the display size of YouTube videos to match your blog’s layout. This required a bit of hacking in the previous version. Youtuber generates valid XHTML and is extremely easy to use. If you embed all you YouTube video’s using this plugin, changing a few values in the options page will allow you to adjust the display dimensions of all the videos on your blog. This might come in handy if you ever upgrade or change your theme.
More info (as well as a download link for the new version) in the original post.
WP-Cumulus has moved to WordPress.org. The information on this page is no longer maintained. Please see http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/ for the latest version of the plugin and documentation.
A little while ago I posted a Flash based tag cloud frontend here that was hoping to convert into a plugin for WordPress. I had some time on my hands tonight, so I decided to finish it. The actionscript needed a major overhaul, and in order to allow decent integration into as many layouts as possible the plugin itself needed an options page. Thanks to WP’s brilliant documentation, and lots of helpful posts by people who’s PHP skills far exceed mine, it’s now done.
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I love tags. I think it’s a brilliant idea to tag blog post. Not so much because I feel it enables people to find information they’re looking for, but because tag clouds usually offer a more adventurous mode of navigation. If I click on a tag called “water” there’s no way of telling whether I’m going to end up reading about water shortages in the third world or the chemical composition of rain. And I like surprises.
What I do not like however, is the way tag clouds traditionally look. Enlarging the font for often-used tags causes all sorts of line height weirdness, which bugs me. This why I started experimenting with Flash to see if I could come up with something better looking. I’m so happy with the initial results I decided to post them here. Both the movie and the plugin itself need loads of work, but please feel free to tell me how you like it so far.
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
P.S. The tag cloud displayed by the movie is this site’s actual ‘live’ tag cloud, and yes, if you manage to click a tag the page for that tag will open… 
P.P.S. You can download the plugin here. The FAQ should answer most of your questions.
How cool is this? A Firefox plugin that raises the bar for all other image browsers. Installing it will add a small ‘play’ button to images on Flickr, Picasa and tons of other sites. Clicking that button open the PicLens screen where you can intuitively browse through the gallery in 3D. Very easy to set up, and a surefire way to impress your friends.
A couple of people have emailed me questions about playing SWF files using the this.player plugin I released last week. There are some limitations to this, which I forgot to mention in my initial post. I’ll try to clarify things a bit more.
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I’ve never gotten around to releasing the Flash player plugin I wrote a couple of months ago. It’s basically a small player written in Flash that I’ve been working on for some time now wrapped in a Flash plugin. It allows you to use simple tags to embed FLV, SWF (click here for limitations) and MP3 files into WordPress posts.
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