There were two things I wanted to see changed in the bootScore theme before venturing into the big interventions. Fortunately, it was easy to get a more fancy tag cloud and an improved list of recent posts showing the featured images as thumbnails:
Solution
- For getting a nicer tag cloud
- install the Plugin Cool Tag Cloud,
- goto
Appereance/Widgets
, - copy the widget
Cool Tag Cloud
into the sidebar, - open it to configure it,
- set the value
Largest Font
to 17 (so that the tags denoting more posts are displayed larger), - select an image color fitting the style of your theme,
- and: Bingo.
- For getting a nicer recent post list
- install the plugin [Recent Posts Widget Extended] https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/recent-posts-widget-extended/,
- goto
Appereance/Widgets
, - replace the standard widget recent-post-widget in the sidebar with the new recent-post-widget extended,
- and again: Bingo
Background
WordPress offers some plugins for improving the tag cloud. Its own widget is a little spartan. But most of the alternatives are somehow outdated1 or try to offer complete tag management. Thus, for the moment2 I could only find two candidates: Cool Tag Cloud and Creative Tag Cloud. The latter produces a very stylish spiral. But it is difficult to configure. And the result does not properly work on small devices. Quite different in contrast: Cool Tag Cloud. On its description page, it pretends to be Open-Source Software. But the repository neither contains a license file nor a licensing statement. So — as a FOSS purist — I should ignore it, which I do not do because it is officially hosted as a WordPress plugin and WordPress is licensed under the GPL‑2.0. In other words: I am counting on the Copy-Left Effect.
WordPress delivers its own recent post widget as well as it contains its own tag cloud widget. And the recent post widget also produces a visually rather limited result. For its improvement, I bet on the plugin recent post widget extended. According to its readme.txt, it is licensed under GPL-v3 or later. And eventually, it directly does what I wanted that it should do.