Since I’m the newest member of the Automattic team perhaps a little introduction is in order. In the past I’ve been a jack of all trades IT guy: system admin, programmer, DBA, et cetera. Now my focus is on WordPress. My off time is spent mostly with my wife and two daughters, with the occasional basketball game thrown in there for good measure.
Now on to the news: another new widget, and a new option for a few others.
For those of you who are really into tag clouds you’re in luck, now you can display your blog categories as cloud using the new Tag Cloud widget.
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If you aren’t into tag clouds, but still looking for something a little different in the way you display categories we have something for you too. The Categories and Archives widgets now have options to use a drop down menu. This will be especially helpful to those of you who want your categories and archives list to take up less room on the sidebar.
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WordPress.com News 
Love the cloud, my list was also getting too long. My cloud words are overlapping a bit though:(
I should say, overlapping more than looks good.
sweet feature guys
It is sth that i was waiting for a long time 🙂 Superb! Better eye-candy style for my blog 🙂
Awesome!!! i spent a lot researching about tag clouds and you made life easier!! Cheers!
Thanks – this is great! Can I second the request for drop-down menus for blogrolls?
Thanks again.
thank you! thank you! thank you!
Thanks! I love clouds, it’s a great way to see what are the most popular topics at a glance. You’ve made my day by adding this feature 😀
Tag clouds.. what I always wanted! Thanks 🙂
A nice one this tag cloud widget.
Keep up the good work!
Praise God!
Lovin’ this idea!
PS: Would love to see “Would you like to get emails to follow this posts blog comments?” as a checkbox soon!
Thanks for that! is very, very nice and useful 🙂
~Jumps up and down with joy.~ Yay!! Thank you!
Gee… More and more gadgets…. Thanks
WordPress are always getting better and better 🙂 thanks dude!
I love the cloud! 😉
My head is already in the clouds, so it’s fitting that my tags join me up here. Thanks!
WOW !!!!
COOLIO!!
Welcome to wordpress and thanx for the good news:P
Marvelous !! Thank you !!! 😀
I love the tag cloud. Installed it as soon as I saw it on the Widget choice bar. It won’t come off my blog!!!
oh, lovely. tags and tag clouds are two of the coolest things to ever happen to content management (usually i don’t even care about content management but here’s an exception) look forward to trying the feature out, probably today – thanks very much for thinking of us, cheers…
Another great feature on WordPress! Thank You!
Great thought but it splatters my sidebar clear to New Jersey. Makes it too jagged for my taste. I suppose it fits in some templates but not mine. Just when I thought a solution to clutter had been found — oh well. Keep on truckin’
……skyblu
Excellent! Thanks.
I’ve really wanted to have a tag cloud. Thanks so much!
Yay! Can’t wait to try it out! Tanks! *g*
Welcome to WordPress, Josephscott!
And cool widget. I’m gonna use it for sure.
great keep it up welcome aboard..
tagman
firoze shakir
photographerno1
Lovely! Thank you!!
oh gosh I still can’t figure out how to delete widgets o.O
This is great – I’m using both already! Thank you wordpress! X
hey that really eye catching tool ..well kudos to you all .. really the wordpress has changed the working in the field of the blogging round the world.. Keep Bringing such useful tool
Regards
Harshit Pandey
I was really trying to fit in stuff in available categories! The love just grows! 🙂
Is it possible to get HOVER DROP DOWN LISTS for pages on wordpress. It would be a great way to add more pages. It would also add a bit more of a friendly user feel to it.
Thanks for the great work!!!!!
Welcome to the gang, good going.
Excellent stuff.
keep up the good work.
Tag clouds, yay!
Excellent stuff!!!!
Thanks a million, now I don’t have to my blog somewhere else, just to get these widgets for me 🙂
You people are great!
cool! thanks.
i know i’ve said it before, but you keep getting better and better.
exactly what i wanted! woo-hoo!
very nice!
wow. love it. Will try it out soon.
Very much appreciated by those of us who have a million categories. WordPress is truly awesome, and fracas will have a surprise for the WordPress folks in the next few days!
Great ideas! – although at the moment seems to have some practical problems, but I’m sure you short that out soon. 🙂
I guess this wont be good for categories, becasue viewers wont like if its a drop down. It is better to have it as it is.
But it is good for Archives, because they mite search, but not categories
wow..that’s a great space saver..n i think will look neat too!!
I’m no cloud man, but the dropdown option was great. Now I just have to figure out what to put in the empty space my categories list used to take up..
Like others in this thread, I would also love to have the same option for blogrolls.
And one small complaint: Like Anmar Mansur, I find the space between the title and the drop down menu a bit to small (I use the Press Row theme). Fix that, and everything is just perfect!
Beautiful!
Thanks, drop downs are great. saves so much space in side bar.
Yes! I’ve been waiting for these features. Nice work.
I really like this one! Thanks!
can you add this feature to a ‘page’, since my tags are way too long to include in a sidebar
thank you
This is awesome. Seriously. Thank you!
Great. I immediately added it to my blog. But it does not seem to work well with certain themes.
Wow, at last my payers anwered, thanks for the clouds
I would have loved to rave about this feature except for the following:
1. In introducing this widget, the wordpress team had managed to reset my site presentation to default. This means, what ever customizations I had made to my sidebar and footers (as widgets) got lost. I had to spend the greater part of an hour to get back my old site.
2. I had introduced additional site counters using the text widget. Thanks to your messing around, my site counter was off my sidebar for god knows how long. So I have no way of tracking today’s hits.
3. The tag cloud … well, is a tag cloud. But it looks too clunky on the sidebar. Maybe some more customizations in the form of max and min font sizes would have helped?
4. Tags should have been an alternate mechanism of classification apart from categories. Categories, IMO, should represent broad level groupings with tags as fine level classifications.
5. One thing I note is that my categories listing has an extra header called “Categories”. No links, it just sits there and indents the rest of the category list. Bad UI, or plain oversight?
To summarize, tags are a must have feature, but in this case, I must say that the implementation and transition has definitely been not up to the mark.
Thanks for fixing the drop down to now have alpha order and number of posts in K2 theme.
Thanks for the drop-down option…my blogroll is getting a little long.
PS The more things we can put in drop-down the better IMHO
Thanks, good job!
Wow, you guys are responsive. Thanks for listening!
Great, but what i really need is …. a widget that can show all parent categories and also able to drop down the sub categories for each parent categories. anyway thanks.
Nice, new feature! 🙂
Thanks, and Welcome to the ‘hood.
Wishes, minerva*
Hi, Joseph! You fixed the size of letters perfectly! It looks now great! Thank you very much!
That’s great, yeah!
that’s a very nice new widget!
thank you very much, josephscott.
nice
Hi, Joseph,
Welcome! with such beautiful and excellent features
Thanks a lot
Meg
Nice, finally a simply functional widget without glamor.
Good looking. 🙂
Nice job saving space. Although, I’ve only be blogging for a short time, I can see how the page can get cluttered quickly. Keep up the good work.
Great, I love the drop-down option. I tried it on my categories but it looks too wide for my left column (I leave it so you can see how it looks with a mac/firefox). Could the size be adaptable to the width of the column?
Thanks!
It’s cool – especially the drop down lists. I want to use them! At the moment I can’t though as the spacing is too close (there is no gap between the list and the next thing on the sidebar) and it looks kinda ugly.
If you put in a gap, I’d be really happy.
Thanks for the hard work!
Ok, so I just noticed that it is working really well for other people. so maybe I should add that I use the Almost Spring theme.
I really do appreciate the hard work (really!).
Awesome! Tag Clouds are even better than real clouds!
Wow, I’ve always wanted a tag cloud… Oh. On my Regulus theme, it just comes out like a long list, no matter how I adjust the font size. Never mind.
Great addition, I added the tag cloud 🙂
Totally awesome solution to my ‘never-ending sidebar’ issues. LOVE the drop down option. You guys rock.
Great, thank you.
The drop-down looks great, but the font does not match the theme font. Any ideas on making the font in the drop-down the same as that of the theme.
Another good feature.
Great stuff again! keep up the good work!
Thaaaaaaaaanks!!!!! Great!
Fan-tas-tic!!
Thanks a lot 🙂
The idea of drop down menu is great for Archives, but not so good for Categories, because drop down menu does NOT wrap long text. If you have long names for your Categories like I do, you will find that the drop down menu will automatically expand your sidebar in order to fit it.
Great idea!
Much appreciated 😀
Coolest…for now…
I love the tag cloud! It looks elegant, and it saves a chunk of room off the sidebar.
Thanks so much!
Very Sick Widget….gotta get dat. “R”