CloudNine Blog

CloudNine 3.0 is ready for the world. And when I say world, I mean people who are running MovableType 3.3 with tagging support. Today has been overly productive and the 3.0 release comes with some really cool features.

There is a new container called MTCNTagCloud which allows you to create clouds based on actual MT::Tag objects. It will also show different results depending on if the cloud was created inside of an Entry or not.

<MTEntries> <$MTEntryTitle$><br/> Tags: <MTCNTagCloud glue=", "> <a href="http://blog.socklabs.com/tag/<$MTCNTagStub$>"><$MTCNTagLabel$></a> </MTCNTagCloud> </MTEntries>

<MTCNTagCloud glue=", "> <a href="http://blog.socklabs.com/tag/<$MTCNTagStub$>" style="<$MTCNTagCSS$>"><$MTCNTagLabel$></a> </MTCNTagCloud>

This release is only known to be compatible with MovableType 3.3 It is not guaranteed to work with release prior to 3.3.

Download CloudNine-3.0.tgz

Tags: cloudnine, download, release, template example

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

I've had a few users ask me if it would be possible to separate the css from the items in the cloud. After trying a few different things I've found a temporary solution.

In release 2.5 there were a few changes made to make it much easier to do this. Mainly the addition of the CatCloudCSSID tag. Look at the following example and consider ways to adjust it to your own templates.

The CSS:

<style>
<MTCatCloud>
.<$MTCatCloudCSSID$> {
<$MTCatCloudCSS$>
}
</MTCatCloud>
</style>

The cloud:

<MTCatCloud>
<a href="http://blog.socklabs.com/tags/<$MTCatCloudStub$>" class="<$MTCatCloudCSSID$>"><$MTCatCloudLabel$></a>
</MTCatCloud>

Tags: cloudnine, css, documentation, template example

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This release is only known to be compatible with MovableType 3.3 It is not guaranteed to work with release prior to 3.3.

CloudNine 2.6 is ready for general consumption. This is a very minor release consisting of an adjustment to CloudCreator that lets us set category stubs and display real category labels.

With this release there is also more documentation and explanation in the plugin settings page.

Download CloudNine-2.6.tgz

Tags: cloudnine, download, movabletype, release

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

CloudNine has been improved and tweaked and the 2.5 release is ready. This release includes some improvements to category label display and linkage. This release also makes it easier to seperate css and html as per user request. Also in this release was a fix to allow users to set the font size types, aka pt or px.

Please make note of the changes in syntax when building clouds. The tag MTCatCloudName is being phased out and replaced by MTCatCloudLabel. Two additional tags, MTCatCloudStub and MTCatCloudCSSID, have also been added.

Here is an example of usage:

<MTCatCloud>
<a href="http://blog.socklabs.com/tags/<$MTCatCloudStub$>" style="<$MTCatCloudCSS$>"><$MTCatCloudLabel$></a>
</MTCatCloud>

Download CloudNine-2.5.tgz

Tags: cloudnine, download, movabletype, release, template example

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Tim Knight emailed me and made a few suggestions and feature requests that I really liked. Inspired by that, CloudNine is now at version 2.4 and comes with some enhancements that really make it shine. The latest revision now includes real color schemes and gradients. All colors in the scheme should be web safe as well.

With a little hunting I found the following perl modules: Color::Scheme and Color::Spectrum. After a little hacking, I've included the base features from both and now in the settings you can specify a starting color (6 char hex string) point and it will automatically create a color scheme and then color gradient from that scheme.

Download CloudNine-2.4.tgz

Credit is due to the developers of Color::Scheme and Color::Spectrum, Ian Langworth and Jeffrey Hayes Anderson and this handy website (http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html).

Tags: cloudnine, color spread, download, features, release, thanks, user feedback

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a small release for a user requested feature. Several users have asked for the ability to set the minimum number of entries that a category must have to be included in the cloud. This is now possible through the plugin configuration settings. This release also includes some settings cleanup.

Download CloudNine 2.2

Tags: cloudnine, configuration, download, release

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I took the module that is used by CloudNine to create the tag cloud and turned it into an independant module of its own. You can check it out on CPAN or download it from this site.

Download WWW-CloudCreator-1.0.tar.gz

Tags: cpan, download, perl module

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 9:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've put up some screenshots as requested.

Tags: cloudnine, flickr, screenshots

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

On the world wide web there are a growing number of project blogs. I think these are great because they really allow for a lot of flexibility. Instead of creating a static page to point to downloads, you simply tag or categorize posts so you can easy direct to the most recent download post. Developer documentation is also simplified because of the search and organization that most blogging systems offer.

This is my attempt at creating a developer blog for the CloudNine plugin. Here you will find information regarding releases, documentation, bugs and features.

It is using a loose tag organization. If you want to find the most recent release you can always find it at the top entry tagged 'release'. If you are looking for documentation check items tagged 'documentation'. The rest is pretty self explanatory.

The site is open to comment and trackback so please provide as much feedback as possible.

Tags: cloudnine, organization, project blog

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Some afternoon hacking this weekend yielded some productive results. Today marks the release of version 2.1 of CloudNine. This is considered a maintenance and minor feature release.

The first bug was found with categories that have capitol letters in them. Now the cloud will lowercase and scrub all labels going into the cloud creator. This scrubbing also includes converting spaces to underscores.

This release will also include entries with 1 or possibly no entries into the cloud.

This release now allows you to create a cloud from all blog categories. Note that this plugin doesn't automatically create category urls because of the complexity of hierarchies and such, but it will let you create global category clouds.

<MTCatCloud all="1">
<span style="<$MTCatCloudCSS$>"><$MTCatCloudName$></span>
</MTCatCloud>

Get the latest release: CloudNine-2.1.tgz

Tags: cloudnine, development, download, organization, release, tagging, template example

Posted by Nick Gerakines at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)