A filtered tag cloud plugin for WordPress

See the patterns. Hide the noise.

Why Dreamy Tags exists

Tag clouds are great in theory—but in practice they often:

• Mix unrelated content together
• Highlight tags that appear on every post
• Fail when a site grows to host multiple series, podcasts, or projects

Dreamy Tags was created to solve a very specific, very common problem:

How do you surface themes inside a subset of your content without rewriting your taxonomy?

The answer is filtering—done thoughtfully.

What Dreamy Tags does

Dreamy Tags generates a tag cloud using only posts that match your criteria:

You can filter by:

• Category (e.g. “Podcasts”)
• Required tags (e.g. “Dreamy Audio Podcast”)
• Excluded tags (e.g. “Audio Diary”, “Dream Journal”)

And optionally:

• Auto-exclude the filtering tags themselves
  (So the tag you used to filter doesn’t dominate the cloud)

The result is a tag cloud that highlights recurring themes, not administrative labels.

Two ways to use it

1. Shortcode

For classic WordPress setups or quick insertion:

[dreamy_tag_cloud cat="3,4,5" tags="16,17" exclude="108,109" auto_exclude="true"]

Shortcodes accept comma-delimited IDs and work anywhere shortcodes are supported.

2. Gutenberg Block (recommended)

Dreamy Tags also ships with a dynamic Gutenberg block:

• Live preview in the editor
• Inspector controls for filtering options
• No manual markup required
• Server-rendered output for performance and compatibility

This makes it easy to experiment and immediately see how different filters change the results.

With Dreamy Tags:

• Only the correct podcast episodes are included
• The series tag is hidden automatically
• Common but unhelpful tags can be excluded
• The remaining tags reveal recurring dream themes

This turns a tag cloud into an analytical tool, not decoration.

Designed to fit real WordPress sites

• Works with existing taxonomies
• No required renaming or prefixing
• No assumptions about page templates
• Compatible with widgets, shortcodes, and blocks
• Uses WordPress-native APIs and patterns

Dreamy Tags adapts to your content instead of asking you to adapt to it.

Open source & permissive

Dreamy Tags is released under the ISC License:

• Free to use
• Free to modify
• Free to redistribute
• Minimal restrictions

You’re encouraged to fork it, improve it, or tailor it to your own workflow.

ISC License Details

Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) license details:

You are allowed to

• Use the software for any purpose
• Modify it
• Copy it
• Distribute it
• Include it in proprietary or commercial software

You must

• Keep the copyright notice
• Keep the license text

You are NOT required to

• Open-source your changes
• Distribute source code
• Use the same license in derivative works

Warranty Disclaimer: The software is provided as-is

Get the plugin

• Source code & documentation:
  https://github.com/lewismoten/dreamy-tags
• Installation:
  Download the ZIP and upload it through your WordPress dashboard, or install from source.

What’s next

Planned or potential improvements include:

• Selecting categories and tags by name, not numeric ID
• Expanded styling controls (colors, spacing, min/max sizes)
• Optional display of post counts per tag
• Enhanced editor UX for large archives

Dreamy Tags is actively evolving alongside a growing archive.

Who this is for

Dreamy Tags is especially useful if you:

• Run multiple series or podcasts on one site
• Maintain a long-form archive or research log
• Care about discoverability and patterns
• Want tag clouds to mean something

If your site thinks like a library, this plugin will feel at home.