You don’t have to use it with default settings.
If you use WordPress widgets on your self-hosted WordPress blog, you may not be fully satisfied with the way the Tag Cloud widget looks and works on your site. I know I wasn’t. The maximum font size was too large for the most commonly used tag (helicopters, on my blog) to fit into the column in which I’d put it. Since I wanted my tag cloud in the narrow column in which it resided, I had to make a change.
The answer is to modify the wp_tag_cloud function in the category-template.php file. It’s remarkably easy to do. Here’s how.
- Open the file /wp-includes/category-template.php.
- Scroll down to the line that begins
function wp_tag_cloud. If you’re using WordPress 2.7 and haven’t made any other changes to this file, you should find it at line 552. (You can always do a search for it; I found the general area by searching for “tag cloud.”) - Make changes in the array as follows:
- To specify the smallest font size, set the value after ‘smallest’. The default is 8 points.
- To specify the largest font size, set the value after ‘largest’. The default size is 22 points.
- To specify the maximum number of tags included in the cloud, set the value after ‘number’. The default number of tags is 45.
I changed my settings to 6, 16, and 75 respectively. You can see the results in the screenshot here, as well as in the sidebar for my blog, An Eclectic Mind. - Overwrite the existing file with the changed file.
When you reload a page that uses the Tag Cloud widget, your changes should appear immediately.
Keep in mind that if WordPress is updated and the file you changed is replaced, you may have to repeat these steps to reset your defaults.
Learn More
Learn more about working with a self-hosted WordPress 2.7 installation — or WordPress.com. Check out my WordPress courses on Lynda.com.