Robert@PNG

One of the advantages of a self hosted wordpress blog is the ability to tailor the structure, layout and functionality. I might have compared it once to owning an earlier model british motorcycle - due to the compelling nature of having to go under the hood. The possibilities of wordpress are endless and only really limited by one’s imagination and one’s ability to “fiddle” (the nerd factor).

The customisation is mainly done with add-ons or what are known as plugins. Naturally one can go deeper and modify underlying templates and also by modifying the building blocks of wordpress by way of CSS and PHP code changes.

I recently came across a Wordpress plugin that shows rather nicely what it is that I’m talking about. The plugin is called “WP-Cumulus” and does the following:

WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Clicking the tags can be a little hard (depending on your speed setting) but does take you to the appropriate page :).

Tags in Wordpress are similar to keywords and allow one to organise blog posts by a specific topic (or keyword). There are many add-ons (or plugins) available fro wordpress that allows one to display these tags on the blog providing the reader with a feature to “drill” down so to speak.

I wanted to write this post and share this plugin with you as I think it’s not only cool but demonstrates very well the richness and function available to the web or blog designer in a very graphical way. To see the plugin below in action you will need to have flash enabled within your browser.

Ladies and Gentlemen - hail Cumulus!!

(tip: move your mouse over and around the 3D sphere and you will see it rotate - if you want to see all posts for a specific tag just click on it and you will be presented will all blog posts with references to the selected topic)

(note: I have also modified the K2 page-archives.php template to include the WP-Cumulus plugin - to see it in action just click the “Archives” menu item at the top of the screen.)