Dec 27

Roller Hacking - Tag Clouds   Posted by sharps, tagged with hacking roller tags

The Christmas break gave me some time to play around with Roller's new tagging support - a feature I've been wanting for quite a while. I don't see any need for categories anymore so I've removed the Dojo-enabled category chooser and replaced it with a tag cloud. The code is simpler and it doesn't need a big wad of JavaScript to run. The only tricky bit is my choice to use transparent text (using CSS's opacity property) or rather the fact that as with most things you have to code for Mozilla and various versions of Explorer. I'll rant about that at some future point when I've debugged the Explorer CSS code a bit more.

The macro to get at the tags is $model.weblog.getPopularTags(a1, a2) - I've no idea what the first argument is but -1 seems to work; the second argument specifies the number of tags to return. There another entry you can use within a post that will display the tags associated with the post - #showEntryTags($entry) - unfortunately the resulting markup doesn't have any styles associated so I may need to override the macro and add some.

The one thing that's still bugging me is the default Roller pager (ie. the text that says "Main | Next page >>") - I'll need to customize that macro so it says something like "Latest | Older >" and ensure it sits in one of the CSS containers so I can control it's location easier.

At some point I'll post the code - but I'll need to tidy it up a little first and make it a smart enough to scale as tag counts increase.