Results tagged “WordPress” from 6,000 RPM's

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August 24th, 2008 - This blog entry is outdated.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.

WordPress filled a huge gap in the marketplace when Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, decided to screw with their licensing. At the time, Movable Type was numero uno in the blogesphere. Researching articles with the keywords 'migrate', 'wordpress', 'movable type' returns thousands of results of people switching from WordPress to Movable Type, but very few results the other way around.

As of late, WordPress has been annoying the hell out of me. Ever since the 'upgrade' to version 2.3, I've had nothing but issues with WordPress. My number one complaint was my theme was magically possessed. On blog entries, it would sometimes show the correct number of comments, sometimes not. Navigating to the entry page would show the comments, and still the number of comments would be wrong. Perhaps this was a 'feature' of version 2.3. In any case, it was quite annoying and caused me to reevaluate my blogging software.

Another issue I had was with WP-Cache. WordPress in a shared hosting environment such as mine, is quite slow. WP-Cache sped things up a bit, but only marginally. Perhaps it would of done a better job if my site was getting hit all the time - but it wasn't.

I evaluated Expression Engine and Movable Type 4. I decided to go with Movable Type because Six Apart has since changed their licensing and have made available a free version for personal use as well as an open source version. All of which are compatible with their larger commercial offering.

Being somewhat shallow, one of the major selling points for me was the interface. Movable Type is pretty, it's sexy and it's completely functional. Think of it as a Lamborghini that's as easy to drive as a Honda.

The decision of ditching WordPress in favor of Movable Type was taken very seriously. I knew in advance that the plugin support, availability of themes, etc was far superior in the land of WordPress and almost desert-like for Movable Type. Even with these obstacles, I chose my migration path.

The actual migration was quite painless. Movable Type was able to import all of my uploads, entries and comments. The only thing I had to do was figure out the templating system. At first, it made absolutely no sense at all. After a few hours of experimentation, I found it to be quite logical. It was just very different from WordPress, so my learning curve was a bit steeper.

So for all of you celebrating the release of WordPress 2.5, I'm happy for you. May it work better for you than it did for me.