Tag cloud sidebar widget for WordPress
June 14th, 2006 7:29:40 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
On the advice of Alec Saunders, I enabled tagging in my blog using the Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress 2.0. It has a lot of nice features and good documentation. It even provides a great function for generating a tag cloud, where you can render tags differently depending on their usage without much trouble. However, it doesn’t provide a sidebar widget, and you can’t just plunk PHP code into a text widget, because it isn’t executed on the server. So, I decided to write this little widget that you can download below.
Installation and configuration instructions are included in the readme.txt file enclosed.
UPDATE: I added caching to improve performance, using the default expiration of 900 seconds (15 minutes). That saves a database SELECT and quite a bit of processing. You can release the cache by saving changes to the widget in the WordPress dashboard.
UPDATE: I have corrected a couple of problems in the Jerome’s Keywords plugin itself. You can get that here.
UPDATE: Jerome released a 2.0 beta version of the plugin. To get a compatible version of the widget, go here.
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[...] That makes at least three people besides Jerome who have contributed to the functionality of this plugin, resulting in three different versions of the plugin itself, an add-on plugin, and a widget. What do you say, Jerome, can we get all these pieces packaged together before they get further split apart? Can we set up some sort of collaborative development project to help you to keep up? [...]
[...] Note also that this version of the widget is not compatible with earlier versions of the plugin. If you need a widget for earlier versions of Jerome’s Keywords, get version 1.1 of the widget here. [...]
[...] to all previous posts on this subject for the sake of those who subscribe to comments. Tags:Chip’s Tips for [...]
[...] Tag cloud sidebar widget for WordPress I added caching to improve performance, using the default expiration of 900 seconds (15 minutes). That saves a database SELECT and quite a bit of processing. You can release the cache by saving changes to the widget in the WordPress dashboard. (tags: blog tools wordpress) [...]