A Dynamic Floating Tag Cloud in Drupal, using Flash

Have you ever seen the floating tag clouds on sites (like the one I use) and thought, "Cool, I want one of those!" ?

Well, I did - and a little Googling later, I came across the Wordpress version (WP-Cumulus) by Roy Tanck... then a little more searching led me to a Drupal module called Cumulus, ported by Pratul Kalia & Bjoern Jacob.  It can be found here:

http://drupal.org/project/cumulus

The Module

It relies on Tagadelic, which is probably the best known (perhaps only?) tag cloud module for Drupal - but I've always found static tag clouds to be pretty ugly and so I'd never used it... but the Cumulus module definintely tranforms the 'ugly duckling' - apart from the performance hit of having a flash object on the page, its pretty and fun to play with (at least for a few seconds).

^ Boring old tag cloud  ---  Pretty new tag cloud ^

Installation

Installing is simple.  Download the two modules, and the required .js file (Found here) as noted in the instructions on the Cumulus page (put that in your Cumulus module directory), then enable both modules.  From there you just need to know what taxonomy term ID you want to use - simply go to Admin - Taxonomy and click "List Terms" for the one you wish to use for the cloud, then look at the address in the address bar, it will end in the term ID you need to use.

I use it in a block, and when I first set it up it I ran into a problem that wasn't well documented - it just didn't do anything.  The solution is simple - make sure when you set the block active in the sidebar (or wherever you intend to use it) that you configure it - even if you don't want to change anything - if you don't click configure then save it just won't work.  Then clear your caches if things still are not looking right.

While in the configuration, I upped the smallest font size from 10 to 12, changed the width and height to suit my sidebar and changed the colours (including making the background transparent).  Apparently some older browsers don't like the transparent option - and apparently Linux doesn't either due to the currently available version of Flash - let me know below if you have problems.

Update

I've also added a module to my tagging arsenal called TagTool, by jimyhuang.  If you use free-tagging then this is an invaluable one.  It pops up a pre-determined number of previous tags (or ALL of them, or a user defined list) when you are typing a blog entry and you click in the tags input box - you just select the tags you want if they are already there - saves a great deal of typing )