TagCloud (0.3)

TagCloud is a proof-of-concept product to add a tag cloud portlet made with the keywords of all items in a Plone site.

This product is currently being used on the breaking news site of the mexican diary La Jornada.

TagCloud is part of Julius, a project to create a system for Newspaper Workflow Automation based on the requirements of La Jornada and on the IPTC News Architecture.

Installation

This product was tested on Plone 2.5.2.

Place TagCloud in the Products directory of your Zope instance and restart the server. (Linux users should fix permissions of files and folders first.)

Go to the Site Setup page in the Plone interface and click on the Add/Remove Products link.

Choose TagCloud (check its checkbox) and click the Install button.

You may have to empty your browser cache to see the effects of the product installation/uninstallation.

Uninstall

This can be done from the same management screen.

How does it works

TagCloud searchs for all different keywords on friendly types and then creates a cloud based on the number of times every single keyword is found.

To define friendly types go to the Site Setup page in the Plone interface and click on the Search Settings link; all types used on searches will also be used to build the cloud.

The algorithm to scale the tags and some ideas were taken from Anders Pearson's "scaling tag clouds" blog post.

Please note that search engine spiders may stress your site if you have a bunch of tags, so it's a good idea to add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /search	# don't do searches