Portlet Cloud 3.0

The Portlet Cloud presents a set of categories in the form of a cloud in which the size of each category is proportional to its interest, in other words a "visually weighted list". This portlet is inspired by the tag clouds we find in popular tagging systems such as flickr, technocati and del.icio.us. It gives visitors a rapid impression of what they can find on a site.

The interest of a category can be calculated according to three criteria:

1. the number of consultable content items in the category,
2. the number of consulted content items in the category (known from the number of "Reader Notes"),
3. a custom criterion.

The categories can be listed in alphabetic order or by size.

The many options found on this portlet include:

• Categories: the category branches to be presented
• Unit count: criterion for calculating the interest of categories
• Category links: type of link (browsing or searching) to be placed on each category
• Sorting: presentation in alphabetic order or size order (or both)
• Distribution scale: logarithmic or linear
• Levels: number of distribution levels
• Maximum number of categories to display: used to limit the number of categories displayed to the first "n" (a zero value means no limit)
• Threshold: categories smaller than the threshold are not shown
• Refinements: the cloud can be constituted dynamically from descendants of the current category.

The Cloud Portlet is based on the <cloud:cloud> tag that provides all the portlet options and also enables use of a specific algorithm to calculate the interest of each category (by implementing the com.jalios.jcmsplugin.cloud.CloudQuantifier interface).