Hi there,
today I'm releasing my next plugin for coppermine. Please give me feedback via this thread if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions.
To see the plugin at work please visit
http://www.lounge-lizard.org/cms/Regards, Florian
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What it does
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This plugin generates a web 2.0 style moving flash cloud of all the tags to the images insided your database.
The tags of all images are counted and weighed with an logarithmic algorithm to get a proper distribution
(tags that are counted more are given a bigger font etc.)
In total, there are up to 10 distinguished sizes (it's always up to your specific tag distribution). Play around
with the parameters in the configuration settings a bit to see the different effects (max size, min size, threshold
etc.) You can define a specific color for each of the 10 sizes. (Color 10 being the color for the biggest font, 1
for the smalles font). Additionally you can define one highlight color, when you hover over a tag.
Currently, there is only one big system-wide tag cloud from all your images in your library. Because of this,
I added a function to where you can define, whether you want to hide tags from private files, i.e. files
that are in a protected album.
If you have many images with many tags you will have thousands of items to cope with. The cloud will not be much use
then, so I added a function where you can set the minimum amount of images that must have the same tag, before the
tag is added to the cloud. Experiment with it. Start out with 2 if you have a lot of images and see how your cloud
looks.
Upon clicking of a file, the coppermine search function is triggered, so even if you click on a tag of an image
that you are normally not allowed to see, you won't see the image after that.
The tag cloud can be generated on demand (via the plugin manager) or updated any time a picture is uploaded.
To display the cloud, you have three ways to show the cloud
a) make use of the "main_page_layout" Coppermine setting
Enter the value "flashcloud" along the string in the proper position to display the cloud. For example:
breadcrumb/catlist/alblist/random,2/lastup,2/flashcloud
will let you see the cloud listed as the last entry of your startpage.
b) You can reference in your own theme to a page, that only consists of the cloud page. Just call
http://<yoursite><yourpathtocoppermine>/index.php?file=flf_flashcloud/testdrive
For an example come visist
www.lounge-lizard.org/cms/coppermine/index.php?file=flf_flashcloud/testdrivec) Use the parameter to display the cloud on the Coppermine search-page. You can decided whether you want to
display the cloud below or above the search text fields. Note: This feature requires a new hook that had not
been implemented in the publicy release 1.5.2-code. Please upgrade to the latest Coppermine version from SVN,
to have code revision 7225 or higher.
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Installation & Configuration
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Install plugin with COPPERMINE Plugin Manager.
Edit configuration before first running the tool!
Make sure, the file /plugins/flf_flashcloud/cloud_data.xml is writable by your webserver user. Depending on your
webserver setup change the rights to '0775' or '0777'. When you install with the plugin manager,
this step should not be necessary.
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Credits
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- The original tagCloud was taken from
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-cumulus.zip, Autor: Roy Tanck
http://www.roytanck.com. The original flash source file is packed with this plugin as required by the author.
- The basic font size distribution algorithm was found on
http://www.php.de/php-fortgeschrittene/44928-tag-cloud-algorithmus-fuer-schriftgroessye.html and created by
http://simbo.de
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Things on my To-Do-List
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- Think of a way how to generate user-specific clouds including tags for images only the specific user may see