Flash Tag Clouds in SharePoint
So I was at work last week when one of my colleagues came over and asked about the ability to make a dynamic tag cloud in SharePoint. We had collected a bunch of ideas from the workforce and they wanted an intuitive way to display them all in a dynamic fashion. My first thoughts were of the cumulus Wordpress plugin that I use here on my blog, and after turning to trusty Google I discovered that I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. We based our work off of this blog post, with of course a few tweaks of our own.
This of course emphasizes my points of the usefulness of and my discovery of jQuery as it uses some simple jQuery to access the SharePoint list data. We made our integration a bit cleaner by utilizing the jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services. We also used jQuery to fade the screen and display the tag cloud in a “floating” popup over the page content so we could keep it nice and big, positioned on top of the SharePoint page.
i have tried to use this in sharepoint, but never got it to work. My dream would be to get this tagcloud to work with the Kwiz tag lists. The kwiz tag list allows users of the site to add their own tags, so the list grows. It also has the normal tag cloud functionality, where in the number of times the tag is used, determines its size in the cloud. could this tagcloud be manipulated to accomidate the changing nature of the kwiz tag cloud as well as the popularity of the tag?
Charles,
The Cumulus tag cloud is simply fed by XML so assuming you can get access to the Kwiz list data I don’t see why not. I’m not really familiar with Kwiz or where the data is actually stored so I’m not positive how you’d get to it. The Cumulus flash file does the work for you in determining the size of the links you just need to give it a link node inside
I’ve been looking at getting this to work for our system.
Any chance of getting the code you used to display a Tag Cloud via a CEWP for SP2007?
Brett,
Sorry for the delayed reply, I’ve been in the process of moving. The code can/will be the same as you move from WSS3 to SP2007, and even SP2010. What the tag cloud looks for is an XML source, so all you need to do is create a HTML file that writes XML for the cloud to look at.
I used Marc Anderson’s SPServices jQuery library to make the web service call, basically just call the GetListItems operation of the Lists web service, and parse out whatever column you want to display in the tag cloud.
Mike