One of the distinct pieces of functionality we identified earlier was a so called tag cloud.
The tag cloud that is present in the navigation section of all pages shows an alphabetically sorted list of tags. The styling of the individual tags represents the relative number of topics that are marked with this tag. Clicking on the tags will show the list of associated topics. In this implementation, we vary just the font size but we could have opted for additional impact by varying the color as well.
Before we implement a tag cloud, we should take a step back and take a good look at what we need to implement:
We need to retrieve a list of tags
We need to sort them
We need to present markup. This markup should contain links that will refer to a suitable URL that will represent a list of topics that are marked with this tag. Also, this markup must in some way indicate what the relative number of topics is that have this tag so it can be styled appropriately...