New Package BlogCumulus v1.0 published

After a long time offline I have published now a new package called BlogCumulus v1.0. The BlogCumulus is a component originally created by Roy Tanck for Wordpress. The BlogCumulus is a flash driven TagCloud. BlogCumulus.Net is the .Net component of BlogCumulus written by Ryan Tomlinson. I took his code and made a .Net UserControls for Umbraco using the build in Tags.

Hacking and recompiling the umbraco dlls

On the first step I walked through the code and mentioned that the umbraco.editorControls.Tags.library provides a function returning the Tags as objects. Unfortunately this implementation didn't load the number of usages of the Tags, so that I had switch to my own tag retrieving. But stop. In the code of the library the SQL returns the numbers of nodes. Only the ITag interface and the Tag class doesn't provide a Count Property. So I took the umbraco v.4.0.1 Code added the Count Property to the ITag interface

public interface ITag
{
    int Id { get; }
    string TagCaption { get; }
    string Group { get; }
    int Count { get; }
}

added the needed changes to the Tag class in umbrac.editorControls.tags.library.cs

public Tag(int id, string tag, string group, int count)
{
    Id = id;
    TagCaption = tag;
    Group = group;
    Count = count;
}
public int Count { get; set; }

and one line to the function convertSqlToTags in the umbraco.editorControls.tags.library

private static List<umbraco.interfaces.ITag> convertSqlToTags(string sql, IParameter param)
{
    List<umbraco.interfaces.ITag> tags = new List<umbraco.interfaces.ITag>();
    IRecordsReader rr = SqlHelper.ExecuteReader(sql, param);

    while (rr.Read())
    {
        tags.Add(new Tag(
            rr.GetInt("id"),
            rr.GetString("tag"),
            rr.GetString("group"),
            rr.GetInt("nodeCount")));
    }

    rr.Close();
    return tags;
}

I recompiled these two dlls and referenced it in my new project. I added an issue to codeplex and also a small patch. Vote for it and it will hopefully integrated in v4.0.2, so that we use this package without hacks.

The package

The package now includes one dll (thoehler.com.blogcumulus.dll), one UserControl (BlogCumulus.ascx) and one Macro (th.BlogCumulus). On the macro you can set several parameters: The speed of the rotation in %, the width and the height of the control, the font color (in hex notation) the link-template ({0} will be replaced with the tag name) and the paths to the js and the swf. You also have set the TagGroup with for which this TagCould should be set.

Prerequisites

First of all this package needs the two recompiled dlls from umbraco. I also made this with .NET 3.5 using LINQ, so it needs .NET 3.5. If there are many Users who wants to have this in .NET 2.0 I can do it or you can do it by requesting the project.

I hope you will enjoy this package and please feel free to give me your feedback.

Downloads

• The Package itself: th.blogcumulus_1.0.zip
• The Package with the recompiled dlls: th.blogcumulus_with_recompiled_dlls_1.0.zip