Top 10 WordPress Plugin Developers

Christmas! New Year! Cthulhu!As the year is coming to an end, perhaps it’s time for a different kind of “Top X” post. Instead of a list of new WP plugins to try out, here are the top plugin authors – the brilliant people who create outstanding tools and share them with the WordPress community.

The list is ranked by the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin directory. Also check out the big Top 1000 table.

  1. Michael Torbert
    961 306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose).
  2. Matt Mullenweg
    921 827 downloads. Everybody knows Matt, the main WP dev and author of Akismet.
  3. Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
    775 220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls and other cool plugins.
  4. Arne Brachhold
    628 350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
  5. Andy Skelton
    449 345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. Another dedicated hacker.
  6. Alex Rabe
    429 705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery, etc.
  7. Oliver Seidel
    361 918 downloads. Author of cforms II.
  8. Joost de Valk
    328 036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP and numerous other tools.
  9. Donncha O Caoimh
    246 752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache and other assorted plugins.
  10. Vladimir Prelovac
    244 963 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube, various SEO plugins, and more.

Special Mentions

  • Most plugins by a single author : Viper007Bond has 25 plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
  • Highest version number : cforms II version 9.4 by Oliver Seidel. This plugin also has the highest number of user ratings – 419 votes.
  • Longest plugin name : Sliding Post – Slides latest posts with Carousel effect (55 characters) by dasinfomedia
  • Shortest plugin name : mu by Mark Bockenstedt. That’s not WordPress MU – “mu” is an obscure microblog updater plugin.

Notes

I got the source data by using the mostly undocumented WordPress.org plugin API. First I downloaded all the plugin metadata I could get, which turned out to be 3688 plugin records. Then, with some simple SQL magic, I found all distinct authors (2190 unique names) and how many plugin downloads each author has. You can see a selection of the results above.

Granted, the aggregate stats may not be entirely accurate. For example, if a plugin had the “Author” field set to “John Smith and Jane Doe”, it would be treated as a new, distinct author and wouldn’t count towards the download total of either John or Jane. Perhaps that’s not such a big problem anyway 😛

I’m #37, yay?

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76 Responses to “Top 10 WordPress Plugin Developers”

  1. brad pitt says:

    Amazing! Thank you! Will definitely be checking some of these out on my blog!

  2. […] har här sammanställt en lista med de 10 populäraste WordPress pluginen. Några av de plugins som finns […]

  3. […] Top 10 WordPress Plugins Developer […]

  4. Stas says:

    I suggest to use free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition with special WordPress plug-in.

  5. […] The list is ranked by the number of downloads from the WordPress.org plugin directory. You can also check out the huge Top 1000 table or the last year’s Top 10. […]

  6. Very useful Post! really helped me out! hope to check more out soon

  7. Best WP Plugins says:

    Can you provide more information on other wordpress plugins, or do you have some resources you can share with us where we can find such useful stuff? Thanks.

  8. game says:

    wooow, that is amazing and pure nice. Thank you.

  9. […] W-Shadow.com han realizado un Top 10 de Desarrolladores de Plugins para WordPress, lo que equivale a decir lo más famosos y descargados, claro que el crédito no deben llevarselo […]

  10. Hello!, this site of your blog was very helpful for me. But it was difficult to find it with ask. Maybe you should improve it with seo plugins for wordpress like headspace2. Just a tip 😉

  11. I never heard of Matt Mullenweg. Interesting reading this profile and blog. I see they raised alot of money. I wonder how they make any money?

  12. Martin says:

    I wish I would have found this site earlier. It would
    have saved me from getting wiped out

  13. […] Bonus: Compare it to this Top 10 list from 2008. […]

  14. […] Original-Autor dieser Liste gibt auf seiner Homepage detailliert Auskunft darüber, wie er die Berechnungen angestellt hat und zu diesen Zahlen gekommen […]

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