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MT-Cumulus is a Flash-based tag cloud for Movable Type. It is written as a plugin for MT 4.x and is a direct port of Roy Tanck's popular Wordpress plugin.

For an overview, usage, screenshots or to download the plugin, head on over to the MT-Cumulus project page.

August 24th, 2008 - This blog entry is outdated. Please visit the MT-Cumulus project page for a proper Movable Type 4.x plugin of this very popular Flash-based tag cloud. View the MT-Cumulus 1.0 announcement.

No doubt, the availability of plugins for Movable Type is few and far between. After searching for a Flash-based tag cloud for Movable Type 4 and finding no results, I finally gave up. Instead, I focused my energy on finding a similar plugin for WordPress and adapting the implementation for use with Movable Type. The result is WP-Cumulus developed by Roy Tanck which is now successfully running in MT.

Being new to MT, I did not know how to create a plugin, so I opted for the implementation instead. For those of you interested in using this excellent plugin on your MT blog, create a dedicated widget and call it say 'Tag Cloud - Flash'. Then in your layout, include this widget. The only file you'll need from the plugin, is the actual swf file. The rest of the files are WordPress specific and you can discard them.

Here's my code for 'Tag Cloud - Flash'

<div class="widget-tag-cloud widget">
  <h3 class="widget-header">Tag Cloud</h3>
  <div id="tagcloudflash"></div>

  <script type="text/javascript">	 
    var tags = "<tags>";
    <mt:Tags limit="30" sort_by="rank">
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="1"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="18pt" /></mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="2"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="16pt" /></mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="3"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="14pt" /></mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="4"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="12pt" /></mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="5"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="10pt" /></mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="TagRank" eq="6"><mt:SetVar name="font" value="8pt" /></mt:If>
    tags += "%3Ca+href%3D%27<$mt:TagSearchLink$>%27+class%3D%27tag-link-66%27+title%3D%27<$mt:TagName$>%27+rel%3D%27tag%27+style=%27font-size:+<mt:Var name="font"/>%3B%27%3E<$mt:TagName$>%3C%2Fa%3E%0A";
    </mt:Tags>  
    tags = tags.replace(/\?/g, "%3F");
    tags = tags.replace(/&amp;/g, "%26");
    tags += "</tags>";

    var so = new SWFObject("/scripts/tagcloud.swf", "tagcloudflash", "365", "365", "7", "#292929");
    so.addVariable("tcolor", "0xEBAF00");
    so.addVariable("tagcloud", tags);
    so.write("tagcloudflash");
  </script>

</div>

Alternatively, you can download my Tag Cloud Widget here.
A special thank you goes out to Roy Tanck for his work on this project.