Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

As you may all notice, there is a tag cloud on the sidebar. This was made possible by Christine Davis’ most excellent WordPress plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Now, installing UTW is fairly straightforward, however it is just so rich with options that it could confuse those that are not familiar with the way WP works. Here’s how I did it:

• Downloaded the plugin and copied the entire plugin folder to the wp-admin/content/plugins directory.

• Activated the plugin from the WP dashboard.

• Added the code-snippet for displaying the tag-cloud from the themes/example-bits/tags.php file into the sidebar.php in my theme.

• Edited the tag.php to reflect my single.php and uploaded it to my themes directory.

• Edited the $maxtagcolour and $maxtagcolour values to reflect those in my stylesheet in the ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file located in the plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ directory. I just realised that the plugin itself has a configuration option to set these values. Like a true geek, I had gone and done it the hard way. D’oh!

• And finally, I edited the ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php and added onmouseover and onmouseout events for hover colours.

And that’s it! Viola, you can see the tag-cloud on the sidebar, and clicking on a particular tag takes you to the tag results page. There is a lot more that you could do with this plugin, but some day I will get around to it.

And if you are planning to install UTW, you might also find the UTW article by Lorelle on Wordpress to be quite useful.