Since WordPress 2.3, WordPress Widgets have been fully integrated into all versions of WordPress. Using a Widget compatible WordPress Theme bloggers can customize their sidebar content without editing any HTML or PHP code.

One of the available widgets is the Tag Cloud which displays a list of popular tags. Unfortunately, adding the Tag Cloud to my sidebar resulted in the following unreadable mess:

Ugly Wordpress Tag Cloud

Ugly Wordpress Tag Cloud

Obviously this needs cleaning up, but what is the best way to make this look better? A quick look at how the tag cloud widget is being created in wp-includes/widgets.php shows that the tag cloud function wp_tag_cloud() is being called without any parameters and there is no way to currently pass parameters to this. Parameters that can be passed using the wp_tag_cloud() function include specifying the font-size to use for the smallest and largest tags. The default size for the largest tag is 22pt which is clearly too large for some Themes.

To find a possible solution I searched the WordPress Plugin page for tag cloud plugins. The most popular tag cloud plugin is Simple Tags. It doesn’t mention anything about styling the Tag Cloud Widget so I decided to download the Configurable Tag Cloud (CTC) plugin instead. The configurable tag cloud plugin adds a new widget to your list of available widgets. It’s similar to the tag cloud widget provided in the WordPress install, except it allows you to customize all the function parameters as you can see in the following screenshot:

Configuable Tag Cloud Plugin

By setting the smallest font size to 10 and the largest font size to 16 my tag cloud was already looking better:

Wordpress Tag Cloud Widget After

Wordpress Tag Cloud Widget Using Configuable Tag Cloud Plugin

If you are looking for an alternative to the Tag Cloud Widget that comes with a standard WordPress installation I can highly recommend the Configuable Tag Cloud Plugin.