Customizing the wordpress tag-cloud output

Question

I'm using a little function below to list out the post_terms. The function is outputting very specific markup for the grouping, filter, and href attributes (this is a term selector for the jQuery isotope plugin).

$terms = get_terms("post_tag");
$count = count($terms);
 if($count > 0){
    echo '<div class="option-combo tag">';
    echo '<h4>Post Tags</h4>';
    echo '<ul class="filter option-set floated clearfix">';
    echo '<li><a href="#filter-tag-any" data=filter="" data-group="tag" class="selected">any</a>';
    foreach ($terms as $term) {
        echo '<li><a href="#filter-tag-'.$term->slug.'" data-group="tag" data-filter=".tag-'.$term->slug.'">'.$term->name.'</a>';        
    }
    echo '</ul>';
    echo '</div>';
 }

Question:

Given the requirements above where each term has it's own custom href, data-group, data-filter, how would I go about changing this list format into a tag cloud with my requirements?

(an ordered list of terms is way to long for use within a sidebar, hence a tag cloud would work much better when using terms as a selector)

I did look through the codex, but didn't see any examples on how to modify the output of the tag cloud.

thanks

Answer 1

This is how the links are created in wp_generate_tag_cloud (wp-includes/category-template.php)

foreach ( $tags as $key => $tag ) {
    $count = $counts[ $key ];
    $real_count = $real_counts[ $key ];
    $tag_link = '#' != $tag->link ? esc_url( $tag->link ) : '#';
    $tag_id = isset($tags[ $key ]->id) ? $tags[ $key ]->id : $key;
    $tag_name = $tags[ $key ]->name;
    $a[] = "<a href='$tag_link' class='tag-link-$tag_id' title='" . esc_attr( call_user_func( $topic_count_text_callback, $real_count ) ) . "' style='font-size: " .
        ( $smallest + ( ( $count - $min_count ) * $font_step ) )
        . "$unit;'>$tag_name</a>";
}

There seems not to be a way to do what you need. Maybe copying all wp_generate_tag_cloud and modifying it to your needs in your functions.php?