Display Tags in 3 Columns

If you’re tired of all of the tag clouds you see out there and just want a simple list that you can browse through, then this bit of code is for you. In WordPress, there are convenient functions to list all tags (and categories) outside of The Loop in an unordered list. However, this doesn’t make good use of horizontal space and can get out of hand quickly if you have a lot of tags. But, the advantages of having an alphabetical listing is worth the extra effort.

For this particular example, let’s assume we want to list our tags on the archives index page.

<?php
$tags = get_tags();
$tags_count = count($tags);
$percolumn = ceil($tags_count / 3);

for ($i = 0;$i < $tags_count;$i++):
    if ($i < $percolumn):
    $tag_left .= '
	<li><a href="'. get_tag_link($tags[$i]->term_id) . '"rel="tag">' . $tags[$i]->name .'</a></li>
' . "\n";
    elseif ($i >= $percolumn && $i < $percolumn*2):
    $tag_mid .= '
	<li><a href="'. get_tag_link($tags[$i]->term_id) . '"rel="tag">' . $tags[$i]->name .'</a></li>
' . "\n";
    elseif ($i >= $percolumn*2):
    $tag_right .= '
	<li><a href="'. get_tag_link($tags[$i]->term_id) . '"rel="tag">' . $tags[$i]->name .'</a></li>
' . "\n";
    endif;
endfor;
?>
<ul>
<?php echo $tag_left; ?>
</ul>

<ul>
<?php echo $tag_mid; ?>
</ul>

<ul>
<?php echo $tag_right; ?>
</ul>

The majority of this code was modified from a two column version I found on the WordPress Forums, but since I needed three columns I had to take it one step further. The great thing about this code is that you can adapt it to output the tag RSS feeds by simply adding feed before the rel tag. For example:

$tag_left .= '<li><a href="'. get_tag_link($tags[$i]->term_id) . 'feed "rel="tag">' . $tags[$i]->name .'</a></li>' . "\n";

Here’s the code in practice.

If, for some reason, you really really love tag clouds and you think this code is a waste of time, you may want to check out some best practices for using tag clouds.