The collective.vaporisation addons for Plone give to the user a tag cloud portlet.
A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of keywords used into your site. Tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size. Thus, it is possible to find a tag alphabetically and by popularity. The tags are hyperlinks that lead to a collection of contents that are associated with a keyword. This hyperlinks makes a Plone search that show the list of contents marked with the keyword selected.
—Definition of tag cloud from Wikipedia
Big tagcloud used in a collective.portletpage area
With some CSS rules you can customize colors
An advanced feature is the "join navigation" that allows user to make a search related and sequential. During the search the view of the portlet is different. One first part of it shows only the keywords into the contents that are result of the search. A second one show the selected tags allowing user to remove some of them from the search.
When you add this kind of portlet, named "Tagcloud portlet", you're in front of an edit form with many fields.
We see in detail what they do:
- Name to display
- The name of the tag cloud. For display purposes.
- Number of different sizes
- This number will determine the biggest size.
- Number of keywords to display
- This number indicate the max number of keywords shown. The value 0 (zero) show all the keywords.
- Cloud reload timeout
- Time in minutes after which the cloud should be reloaded. This time isn't the only parameter that force the reload of cloud. Put this value to "0" for disabling caching (don't do this on production).
- Start path
- Only the objects under this directory will be taken in consideration. If empty (default), the portlet will search in all the site.
- Indexes to use
- In this field you can select the indexes to use. We can use all the KeywordIndex defined into your site. The default one is "Subject" index of Plone.
- Type of contents
- We can filter the objects by type. Only the objects of the selected types will be used to search the keywords.
- Activate joint navigation
- With this options active the portlet change his view to show only the related keywords. This will be seen during the functionality of search of contents with some keywords.
- Use only the keywords of this list
- A whitelist for a manual choise of the keywords to show. Remove from keywords list: A blacklist for remove some keywords from the shown.
- Mode to use
- Select a mode of use among those diponibile. Now we have only one mode of use. Other one can be implementated by external package through an adapter.
- Sort keywords
- If actived, the keywords will be sorted alphabetically.
If you're using more than one tag cloud portlet you have to remind to use different name. In this way, the "join navigation" will be applied only to the portlet where the user clicks over a keyword.
The list of keywords used into the edit form doesn't change dinamically when the filters change To use the whitelist or the blacklist after a change to one of field used to filter the contents (like "Start path", "Indexes to use" and "Type of contents") you need to save the portlet and re-enter into edit.
During the load of edit form the vocabularies will be recreated.
Tested on:
- Plone 3.3
- Plone 4.0
- Plone 4.1
- Plone 4.2
Developed with the support of:
All of them supports the PloneGov initiative.
This product was developed by RedTurtle Technology team.
Original idea and code came from Souheil Shelfouh, that made vaporisation product