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!

Today while browsing through my daily feeds, I noticed a great post over at Performancing about getting your blog organized with categories and tags.  This post got the creative juices flowing a bit and got me thinking about both categories and tags.

I make it a point to engage in discussions regularly with my fellow bloggers about a variety of topics I have an interest in, including blogging, affiliate marketing, internet real estate, etc.   One thing I always like to find out from fellow WordPress users is whether or not they’re using the tag system that was introduced in WordPress 2.3.   What I’ve found are some very diverse responses, ranging from them not understanding how tags work, to some people that actually prefer to just use tags instead of categories.  Of course in the middle are the people that are attempting to use both.

I personally use categories on all of my sites, but only choose to use tags on a few of them.   For the ones that I do use tags on, I make sure to use the Recommended Tags WordPress plugin so I don’t go overboard with the tags I use.

I’d love to get your take on this.  Do you use categories and/or tags on your blog?