But what is it good for?

Habari Plugin: HB-Cumulus

HB-Cumulus is a Flash-based tag cloud for Habari that displays your tag cloud in a rotating sphere just like the one shown here.

HB-Cumulus is a port of the brilliant WP-Cumulus by Roy Tanck.

HB-Cumulus in action

Features

I've implemented all the functionality offered by WP-Cumulus 1.23 and a bit more. Functionality includes the ability to set...

  • your own width and height
  • your own foreground, background (or transparent) and highlight colours
  • a rotation speed to suit your needs
  • the keywords to exclude
  • the number of keywords to display
  • the minimum and maximum font sizes to use

... all within the Habari plugin configuration options. There is even a preview of the cloud within the configuration section so you can see your changes taking effect as you make your changes.

Limitations

Sadly, there is a limitation: non-latin characters may not show up. To quote Roy's own words on the WP-Cumulus FAQ page:

Because of the way Flash handles text, only Latin characters are supported in the current version. This is due to a limitation where in order to be able to animate text fields smoothly the glyphs need to be embedded in the movie.

You can however modify the flash code yourself by following Roy's instructions here. Unfortunately, I can't do this as I don't have the necessary tools to modify the flash files.

You may want to check the above post for other character sets that have already been created.

Apparently, Flash 10 introduces a new text-element type that may resolve the issue with non-embedded characters. As soon as Roy updates WP-Cumulus to support this, I'll update HB-Cumulus.

Download

For Habari 0.6.x:

HB Cumulus
1.5-0.6.x.zip   HB Cumulus
1.5-0.6.x.tar.bz2

For Habari SVN r3829 and later *:

HB Cumulus
1.6-svn.zip   HB Cumulus
1.6-svn.tar.bz2

* Habari r3829 brought in changes to Tags which breaks this plugin. Version 1.5 of HB-Cumulus is the first release to support these changes.

Installation

  1. Download either the zip or tar.bz2 to your server
  2. Extract the contents to a temporary location (not strictly necessary, but just being safe)
  3. Move the hb-cumulus directory to /<path to habari>/user/plugins/
  4. Refresh your plugins page, activate the plugin and configure it to suit your needs

That's it. You're ready to implement the cloud into your site.

Upgrade

The upgrade procedure is as per the installation procedure, but please ensure you de-activate the plugin first. This will ensure your current settings are merged with any new options that may be added with later releases and reduce the chances of encountering errors.

Usage

There are two ways you can use HB-Cumulus:

  1. In ANY page or post: You can show the cloud in any page or post by putting the following code into the post/page content: 
    <!-- hb-cumulus -->
    This tag is NOT case sensitive, so don't worry too much about the case or spacing. So long as you have all of the above characters in that order, it should display.
  2. In ANY theme file: You can show the cloud anywhere on your site within your theme files, for example in the sidebar using: 
    $theme->hbcumulus();
    This IS case sensitive, so you'll need to be sure you get it 100% correct.

Additional Information

There are a couple of things worth noting for reference purposes:

  • Deactivating the plugin will remove your saved options from Habari.
  • The following options are provided by default:
    • Width: 500px *
    • Height: 375px *
    • Tag Colour: #FFFFFF - to ensure reliable behaviour, HB-Cumulus will only accept 6 character HTML colours *
    • Second Colour: #FFFFFF (Optional) *
    • Highlight Colour: #FFFFFF (Optional) *
    • Background Colour: #333333 *
    • Speed: 100 - percentage *
    • Transparent: FALSE *
    • Distribute Tags Evenly: FALSE *
    • List of tags to hide: <not set> - this can be a space or comma separated list
    • Minimum Font Size: 8pt
    • Maximum Font Size: 25pt
    • Number of Tags to show: 30 - set to 0 or nothing to show all tags.

    More information about the options marked with * can be found on the WP-Cumulus notes page.


  • Hb-Cumulus will work with Habari 0.6.3 and the latest SVN code.

  • Habari has no concept or categories at the moment, so it'll only show tags. If and when Habari gets categories, I'll update the plugin to support categories too.

Revision History

  • 1.6
    • Added block support for the svn version

  • 1.5
    • Updated tagcloud.swf to that provided with WP-Cumulus 1.23
    • Updated swfobject to version 2.2
    • Improved HTML validity
    • Updated code to compatible with new tags related functionality within Habari SVN code (aka 0.7 when it's released).

  • 1.4
    • Tidied up code a bit better and minimised swfobject.js
    • Made compatible with Habari SVN code (aka 0.7 when it's released)

  • 1.3
    • Updated tagcloud.swf to that provided with WP-Cumulus 1.20, which includes the following relevant fixes: "Fixed the mouse pointer not changing to a hand when hovering tags." "Adds Turkish language support to the Flash movie."
    • Like the WP-Cumulus plugin, I've also added a "Compatibility" option. When this is enabled, the plugin will not use the SWFObject Javascript to embed the Flash.

  • 1.2
    • Updated tagcloud.swf to that provided with WP-Cumulus 1.1.8, which includes a change that... "Improves mouse detection in transparent mode"
    • Also sorted out the documenting of the licensing of the various components
    • Updated directory structure to better separate the 3rd party components and the HB-Cumulus code
    • Tidied up code to adhere closer to the Habari coding standards

  • 1.1
    • Fixed bug in plugin de-activation that caused HB-Cumulus settings to be deleted when other plugins were de-activated.

  • 1.0
    • Initial release.

That's it folks. If you encounter any problems or queries, please feel free to leave a comment on the post that relates to the release you're using:

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