I edited the heatmap on my forums to make the smaller tags lighter and the bigger tags darker, this emphasizes the bigger tags and gives a sense of depth in the cloud. Right now i have three levels of color, but it could be easily adapted to use more levels.

In a sort-of unrelated issue, i also added image support to the signatures .

What do you think?

[@box87 Member 17 years, 7 months ago]

I quite like the idea of the different colors in the heatmap. The theme overall is quite pleasing to the eye.

I personally don’t like having images in the sig, but that’s a personal thing. It seems to me that when users have a huge image in their signature, it takes away from the site that they’re on and ends up being self-promotion more than anything else. I’m not against self-promotion at all, though. There is a time and a place for everything, and I think the place for something of that nature would be a clearly labeled separate forum.

Very nice though.

[@wmarcy Member 17 years, 7 months ago]

Can you give directions for your hacks?

[@benbeltran Member 17 years, 7 months ago]

@box, thanks for the comments … yeah it’s really a matter of keeping your users happy because in the end they’re the ones that decide if your site gets hits or not … in this particular case, the market – videogame enthusiasts – is one where people tend to identify their tastes in games with signatures… And of course there are regulations on the height and width of the sigs.

@wmarcy, well … i have the badges system that is a semi-plugin (i’m still learning about it), and this hack … i edited the bb_get_tag_heat_map function in template-functions to add this code:

if(( $smallest + ( ( $count - $min_count ) * $fontstep ) ) < $smallest+1){

$color = "color:#f9a692;";

}else if(( $smallest + ( ( $count - $min_count ) * $fontstep ) ) <= $largest/2){

$color = "color:#f5795b;";

}else{

$color = "color:#f24c24;";

}

right after the

foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {

And then i just echoed $color next to $unit; some lines below.

I know it’s not the proper way to do it but it’s how i know, i’m sure someone will come up with a better option for this

[@box87 Member 17 years, 7 months ago]

What would be great (and doable too) is to set a minimum and maximum color, like you can with font size. It can’t be too hard… maybe someone can see about pluginatizing (English?) it. I will, if and when I have time.

[@benbeltran Member 17 years, 7 months ago]

yeah, it wouldn’t be hard … you’d just do it the same way to do sizes … but the problem is to make it pass through the intermediate colors. A plugin in wordpress does that but it uses the minimum color for a certain threshold and for the rest the maximum.