John Cox

Vanity Cloud Creation

First step is to create a top items instance.
- Use 100 items
- Grab from all publication types
- Select all categories
- Sort By Hitcount
- Show sort value (Important)
- Use all published

Feel free to experiment. You probably do not want to show the summaries, but that might make a neat experiment.

Once done, all that is left is modifying your top item blocks template:

<xar:if condition="!empty($items)"> <xar:set name="dummy">shuffle($items)</xar:set> <xar:foreach in="$items" value="$item"> <xar:set name="size">($item['value'] * .01) * .4</xar:set> <xar:set name="weight">($item['value'] * .01) * 100</xar:set> <xar:if condition="$weight gt 1000"> <xar:set name="weight">1000</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:if condition="$size gt 4"> <xar:set name="size">4</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:if condition="$size lt 1"> <xar:set name="size">1</xar:set> </xar:if> <a href="#$item['link']#" style="font-size: #$size#em; font-weight: #$weight#" title="#$item['title']#">#$item['title']#</a> </xar:foreach> </xar:if>

The heart of the block is shuffling the values. I do this because the sort will show the most popular items first and on down the line. I want a more cloud like appearance, so I shuffle the presorted items. That is the $dummy set in the second line.

Otherwise, that is the entire template. You may want to adjust the min / max values for the cloud to meet your own hit count ratios. My more popular articles are only in the 1000's of views while most are in the 100's. Therefore, I am doing a quick round down on that basis.

Finally, I just call the block on my Base template, since I am not using the Base module with normal instance calls in the template.

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