Zwinkyness

It has come to my attention when I myself tried to use Jerome’s Keywords plugin that it is actually quite (read: damn) hard to installate this plugin properly, let alone make it work the way it should. Since currently the last edit of this plugin was on the 13th Jan 2007 I believe the chances any understandable tutorial coming soon are rare. Therefore, I decided to enlighten you with a tutorial of my own, which will hopefully give you an easier time using the plugin than the information on Vapourtrails did.

Firstly, make sure you have the lastest stable version of WordPress installed (currently this is WordPress 2.2) for best usage. The plugin states it works properly with any version 2.0 and up, but one cannot always be sure of that hence it is safest to always work with the newest version of a product.

The latest version of Jerome’s Keywords can be found on this page and is version 2.0-beta. I suggest you download that one before we get started, since without the plugin this tutorial would probably be useless. You will have to scroll down a little before you can see the link to download the folder including the plugin.

Once downloaded, it is easiest to use a programme such as Winzip to extract the content of the folder. Next thing to do is to upload the folder (jeromes-keywords) and its content to your plugin directory in your FTP programme. The plugins directory should be situated somewhere in public_html/wp-content/plugins. The new folders in your plugin directory (named jeromes-keywords) should include following files: jeromes-keywords.php, legacy.php, license.txt, LightPresstagging.php, managetags.php and options-jkeywords.php. If any of these files is missing, then please redownload the plugin.  

The next step is to login to your Admin Panel and go to Plugin in your dashboard navigation. Search for Jerome’s Keywords in your list and activate the plugin.

So far so good, we have the easy stuff covered. Now this is the part where the explenation on Vapourtrails becomes a bit slobby. From this point on we have the plugin intstalled alright, but what are the possibilities we can do with it?

Creating a small tagcloud in the sidebar.

As you can see in my sidebar, I have a tagcloud installed. The process behind the cloud is that a tag, the more it is used in my posts/pages chooses a bigger font; this is something we normally look for in a tagcloud put Jerome’s Keywords does not bring to you without any tweaking here and there. The process behind the final appearance should be handled in your Admin Panel, right under the category Options. Lets go there and then click on Jerome’s Keywords.

Click here to view a print screen from the Options we need.

What is loaded is an entire page with options. Scroll down to the subtitle Tag Cloud Display since that is what we actually need. To make your Tag Cloud appear somewhat like mine, you will have to change some bits of information here and there. Cloud Tag Link Format shows how the tags will appear in your tag cloud. By default the tags will be listed as an unordered list which means they will basically look the way my categories in my sidebar do right now. Of course this is not the way any of those professional websites handle things, so we do not wish to do that either. What I did here in order to get what I wanted to, was change the default parameters by the following:

<a href=”%fulltaglink%” mce_href=”%fulltaglink%” style=”font-size: %count%px”>%tagname%</a>
Basically where it says %fulltaglink% the link to the tag will be added. I also styled the font so it will appear different according to how many times the tag appears in my posts/pages (I did this by using %count% ) %tagname% simply shows the name you have given the tag.

We are still not done, unfortunately. Keep looking at the current page (Options -> Jerome’s Keywords) and under the sub-title Tag Cloud Display. Look at Maximum Number of Tags to display. Here we want to fill in the number of the maximum amount of tags we want to display in our tag cloud in our sidebar. A good idea would be to set this value somewhere between 20 and 50, so our sidebar does not get overcrowded. Next, we want to apply the maximum and minimum scale for our fonts. As I said earlier, the more entries posted using the same tag, the larger the tag should get. We can acquire this by taking a look at Tag Cloud Scaling Minimum and Tag Cloud Scaling Maximum. These values are set in pixels, so make sure you do not set your fonts too big or too small. I used 12 px as a minimum and 32 px as a maximum, for example.

With this done, we have nearly arrived where we should. All we have to do right now is choose the way we want our tags to be displayed. You can find this under Tag Cloud Sort Order. What most sites use is either a random display or an alphabetical one. This is up to your own choosing, of course. You can use the drop down menu to select another way of arranging the tags.

Well, the back-up process is done. Unfortunately it is not yet time to sit back and relax, since we have one more step to complete. We have to bring our background information into our sidebar. This is, thank god, one of the easiest steps to complete. All we have to do is insert the following code where we want our Tag Cloud to appear in our sidebar:

<?php jkeywords_tag_cloud() ?>

The Tag Cloud will appear, using the settings we applied earlier. To see an example of a working tag cloud, check my sidebar.

I am still planning on playing around with Jerome’s Keywords for a bit, adding tags to all posts and possibly adding a tag page, etc. If some of you seem interested, I would not mind writing tutorials about how I did those things later on (given they worked for me in the first place ) Please let me know what you thought of this tutorial.

Copyright notice: I did not create Jerome’s Keywords, I have nothing to do with the development of the script either and am not affiliated with the script or its creators in anyway. I do own the copyright for this tutorial, so I would like you not to just rip it off. If you find it useful and want others to know about it, a link to my website or to this post will suffice. If some steps of this tutorial are unclear or you have other comments about it, please leave a comment here. In case you are not certain about something else regarding this plugin, you are free to ask here but I suggest you ask it to the original developers since I am not quite sure I will be of any help to you.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and see you soon on a screen near you!