Last week I provided some tips on what you can do to promote WordPress.  This week I wanted to cover something else people can do to show their WordPress pride.   That is of course to link to WordPress somewhere on your site (usually the footer), or to place a WordPress logo somewhere on your WordPress blog.

This way when bloggers using other platforms such as Typepad, Moveable Type, or Blogger visit your website, they will see your sweet design, WordPress plugins, great blog functionality, and want to know how they can get that for their blog.  The answer is of course to switch to WordPress!

How Do I Get a WordPress Logo for My Blog?

Getting a WordPress logo for your blog is as easy as visiting the logo page of the official WordPress site or the WordPress fan art page.   You’ll find logos of all different types and sizes to choose from on both pages.

We all know that WordPress is a blogging platform first, but can also function pretty well as a Content Management System (CMS).   Did you know WordPress can also be used in other more “creative” ways as well?

Mashable recently featured the 7 weirdest and wackiest uses for WordPress, which is one of those posts that definitely lives up to the title.   In their post, they feature WordPress being used in the following ways:

• WordPress as a Social Network
• WordPress as a Newsletter
• WordPress as a Word Processor
• WordPress as a Workplace Chat Room
• WordPress as a Contact Manager
• WordPress as a Wiki
• WordPress as a Task Manager

Have you ever wondered what makes WordPress so great?  I think this post goes to show the flexibility of WordPress.

Last Monday I posted about a generous Gabfire theme giveaway by Mehmet of Gabfire Themes.  Participation was pretty good and I’m happy to announce that we have our winners!

Congratulations to the following people who will be awarded a Gabfire theme of their choice:

• Shawal
• Jean-Baptiste Jung
• K-InTheHouse

If you are one of the winners, please check the email account you used with your comment.  I will be providing you with Mehmet’s email address to make arrangements to claim your prize.

To everyone else, thanks for participating!

Here is this weeks collection of WordPress-related posts:

• WordPress Developer’s Toolbox – Smashing Magazine is at it again, this time providing a useful toolbox for WordPress developers.   We were fortunate enough to have about 5 of our posts featured here.
• WordPress for iPhone Downloaded 100,000+ Times – If you think about how many iPhones are in circulation after only a couple years in existence, this is truly an amazing statistic and a great sign for WordPress.
• Feed Pauser WordPress Plugin – Keith of Techie-Buzz (also Weblog Tools Collection) has released an awesome new WordPress plugin that pauses a post from being made available through RSS.  Click over to get a more detailed description.
• Different Ways to Display Content in WordPress – Devito Design does a great job of sharing a bunch of different ways to display your blogs content in WordPress.

Tags are useful to any blog: As you know it, they allow the user to display a list of posts related to a subject.
Most of the time, tags are displayed with in a tag cloud. If you have 20 different tags, that’s ok, but if you have 100 or more tags your tag cloud will be very hard to read, and no-one will click on it.

This is probably why many blogs recently stopped displaying their tag cloud, or put it on a separate page. But I got another solution.

My wife owns a blog where she reviews books. She use tags to display author names, which is a great use of tags, in my opinion. The tags were first displayed as a list, and it was perfect. But after she reviewed 60+ books, the list started to be too long.

She asked me about a solution, and after some reflection, I came up with the idea of using a drop-down menu (select html element + a bit of javascript). Happily, I was able to found this code on WordPress forums.

First, we have to create a php function. Copy and paste the following code in the functions.php file of your theme (Be careful with the php opening/closing tags!)

<?php
function dropdown_tag_cloud( $args = '' ) {
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',
		'exclude' => '', 'include' => ''
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );

	$tags = get_tags( array_merge($args, array('orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC')) ); // Always query top tags

	if ( empty($tags) )
		return;

	$return = dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args ); // Here's where those top tags get sorted according to $args
	if ( is_wp_error( $return ) )
		return false;
	else
		echo apply_filters( 'dropdown_tag_cloud', $return, $args );
}

function dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args = '' ) {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC'
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
	extract($args);

	if ( !$tags )
		return;
	$counts = $tag_links = array();
	foreach ( (array) $tags as $tag ) {
		$counts[$tag->name] = $tag->count;
		$tag_links[$tag->name] = get_tag_link( $tag->term_id );
		if ( is_wp_error( $tag_links[$tag->name] ) )
			return $tag_links[$tag->name];
		$tag_ids[$tag->name] = $tag->term_id;
	}

	$min_count = min($counts);
	$spread = max($counts) - $min_count;
	if ( $spread <= 0 )
		$spread = 1;
	$font_spread = $largest - $smallest;
	if ( $font_spread <= 0 )
		$font_spread = 1;
	$font_step = $font_spread / $spread;

	// SQL cannot save you; this is a second (potentially different) sort on a subset of data.
	if ( 'name' == $orderby )
		uksort($counts, 'strnatcasecmp');
	else
		asort($counts);

	if ( 'DESC' == $order )
		$counts = array_reverse( $counts, true );

	$a = array();

	$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ' rel="tag"' : '';

	foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {
		$tag_id = $tag_ids[$tag];
		$tag_link = clean_url($tag_links[$tag]);
		$tag = str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', wp_specialchars( $tag ));
		$a[] = "\t<option value='$tag_link'>$tag ($count)</option>";
	}

	switch ( $format ) :
	case 'array' :
		$return =& $a;
		break;
	case 'list' :
		$return = "<ul class='wp-tag-cloud'>\n\t<li>";
		$return .= join("</li>\n\t<li>", $a);
		$return .= "</li>\n</ul>\n";
		break;
	default :
		$return = join("\n", $a);
		break;
	endswitch;

	return apply_filters( 'dropdown_generate_tag_cloud', $return, $tags, $args );
}
?>

Once you have your function, you must call it somewhere on your theme. Just open the file where you want the list to be displayed (Most of the time it is sidebar.php) and paste the following code:

<select name="tag-dropdown" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
	<option value="#">Liste d'auteurs</option>
	<?php dropdown_tag_cloud('number=0&order=asc'); ?>
</select>

Now, you have a very cool drop-down list to display you tags. No more unreadables tag clouds!