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Installing and Configuring Tagadelic in Drupal 6

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Having built two fairly robust and strongly interlinked taxonomies to aid in categorization, SEO and navigability of my site, I decided I wanted one of those (old school) tag clouds to display my lexicon. After waiting for the enormous drupal modules page to load, I decided the best route to follow would be to use Tagadelic, though it appears that I may have to use helper modules to get the fully customizable effect I am looking for.

According to the module description found on the module page of your site: Tagadelic makes weighted tag clouds from your taxonomy terms.

For this tutorial I will be running through the installation, setup and general access to the Tagadelic module (version 6.x-1.2). I am assuming that you have the Core - optional module Taxonomy installed and that you have at least one multi-word taxonomy in place and that it has been used to tag a handful of nodes.

Here we go:

  1. Check your Status Report

    You should have a clear status report (Administer > Reports > Status report) before continuing with these installation instructions.

  2. Download the Module

    Make sure that you download the latest version of the Tagadelic module for your distribution: Tagadelic - http://drupal.org/project/tagadelic

    Once you have downloaded the module, move it to the appropriate modules folder for your install and extract it in place.

  3. Read the README

    Tagadelic is a small module, without any databases, or configuration, that generates pages with weighted tags. Tagadelic is both an out of the box, ready to use module, if you want simple weighted tag clouds. With, or without some small CSS moderations this will probably suit most cases. But tagadelic is an API system too. You can pass your queries to the APIs and get weighted clouds of virtually anything: clouds by amout of views, clouds for a certain user, etceteras. The module does not do all this, but you can make it do that, with quite little coding.

  4. Enable the Module

    From the Modules page (Administer > Site building > Modules), enable the tagadelic module. As a site administrator, run update.php.

  5. Configure Tagadelic Module

    Configure the Tagadelic module (Administer > Site configuration > Tagadelic configuration) to set defaults for the tagadelic views. The following values can be set:

    Tagadelic sort order: This will be the sort order used in all Tagadelic displays. The options are as follows: 'by weight, ascending'; 'by weight, descending'; 'by title, ascending'; 'by title, descending'; and 'random'. The default value for this setting is 'by title, ascending'.

    Amount of tags on the pages: The amount of tags that will show up in a cloud on the Tagadelic page. Amount of tags in blocks must be configured in the block settings of the various cloud blocks. The default value for this setting is 60 tags.

    Number of levels: The number of levels between the least popular tags and the most popular ones. Different levels will be assigned a different class to be themed in tagadelic.css. The default value for this setting is 6 levels.

    Choose to 'Save the configuration' or 'Reset to defaults' if mistakes have been made.

  6. Review Pages and Blocks

    After installation and configuration, you can review the results of your labors which is a page and two blocks that approach the idea of a tag cloud.

    Pages: First off is to go to the Tagadelic page found at yoursite/tagadelic (http://baxwrds.com/tagadelic/). This page lists all the tags in all of your vocabularies. Through the use of URL arguments you can also list the tags only in single vocabulary (http://baxwrds.com/tagadelic/chunk/1) or from multiple vocabularies (http://baxwrds.com/tagadelic/chunk/2,1) additionally vocabularies can be listed in groups (http://baxwrds.com/tagadelic/2,1).

    Blocks: Two types of blocks are created by the Tagadelic module. Firstly a block is created for each of your vocabularies and will be named: Tags in vocab name. Inside the block configuration you can choose the amount of tags to show. If not all tags in the vocabulary are visible a more link will also be present to take the user to the main tagadelic page. An example of these blocks can be seen on the right. The second type of block is 'Tags in the current post' and lists the tags of the current post. Due to the horrible formatting of this block I have chosen not to display it.

There you have it, examples and all. It is a descent module and does what it says, but it does lack documentation. Two resources I found useful were: http://www.webschuur.com/modules/tagadelic and http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/Tagadelic. Peace.

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