Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Tag Cloud plugin for Diem

So I have this Diem based project I'm working on for some time now and at some point I decided I need to display a tag cloud on the page. I thought it will be a trivial thing to add but unfortunately I was wrong. I've searched the symfony plugins database and found nothing, Diem itself doesn't have anything like that as well. So I was tring to find anything interesting outside the symfony community and I found only two (!!) scripts which satisfied my needs.

One of them was a very nice fancy looking flash+mootools based animated tag cloud. I've spent many hours debugging and tweaking it. I thought the level of coolness it represented was worth it. When finally I managed to make it work on firefox I realised it doesn't work properly on IE... Imagine how upset I was. I gave up. I had no more time I could waste on debugging JS in IE

The second script I found isn't so cool but is much simpler in use and has no problem with cross-browser compatibility. It's using jQuery to change html lists into tag cloud. It has some nice features which compensate the simplicity. I decided it's good enough.

Then I had to make a choice: put it into the project as it is or change it into a plugin. I chose the latter as that way it is more portable - who knows if I won't need it in other projects? Extra effort can pay back in the future.

Would such a plugin be useful for you? I'm considering publishing it but don't know if it is worth it ;)

1 comment:

  1. I think it might be useful, I wanted to make something like that myself, but didn't get around to it.

    ReplyDelete