Top 10 WordPress Plugin Developers
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.
- Michael Torbert
961 306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose). - Matt Mullenweg
921 827 downloads. Everybody knows Matt, the main WP dev and author of Akismet. - Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
775 220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls and other cool plugins. - Arne Brachhold
628 350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps, etc. - Andy Skelton
449 345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. Another dedicated hacker. - Alex Rabe
429 705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery, etc. - Oliver Seidel
361 918 downloads. Author of cforms II. - Joost de Valk
328 036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP and numerous other tools. - Donncha O Caoimh
246 752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache and other assorted plugins. - 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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Great use of the API, love these type of stats. Not many surprises though.
Perhaps one day I’ll be on that list, though I have yet to launch my first plugin! 🙂
Great Job! How did you find out how to use the API if it was undocumented? I’ve been very interested in seeing how it works, but haven’t been able to find any tutorials/docs on it. Not even someone really mentioning it before until now! haha. Thanks!
Author of All in One SEO plugin is not the one you mentioned, he just took over the plugin. All Credit for that high number of downloads is the original author. http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Sorry…I don’t know the author’s name.
Just found that since he is no longer active developer of AIO SEO plugin, his rank has slipped to #206! 😆
Yay, I’m #253 on the top 1k list!
Neat script, I didn’t know there was an API for WordPress Extend. I guess there would have to be for WP 2.7’s features…
This is really kool… 🙂
Although I couldn’t make it to the list of 1000 either, I would love to see such stats and ranking data on official wordpress.org
Guess, it will bring more coders and better plugins as many coders will start fighting for ranking. 😉
Thanks for the list guys, got a few plug in from it…
Woohoo #36, funny that plugins that simply order stuff are so popular: My Page Order, My Link Order, My Category Order
Thanks for the list, I am ranked 3rd =D
If I may, there are well over 25 plugins on semiologic.com. But you’ve good reasons to have missed them — most aren’t hosted on wordpress.org. 😉
D.
Thanks for the comments, everyone 🙂
@Chris : Some functions are documented in the source code in /wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php
@Navjot Singh : Oops, I just went by the data from the API; didn’t know which one of them was the original author. I’ll add a notice to the list.
@Denis : I knew I’d miss some plugins/developers, but unfortunately there isn’t any way to get objective stats about those not hosted on wp.org. Eh, I have a few non-hosted plugins myself and I didn’t count those 😉
#86… not bad I suppose!
It’ll be really interesting to see what the results look like this time next year.
Strange thing abt the data is that Uberdose is still the co-author listed at wordpress.org…so does it mean API catches only 1 author if 2 authors are listed against a plugin? Because the author-Uberdose at 206 should share position at No 1 with the co-author.
Doh, I missed the top 1000 list, would be great if you could add the developer’s 2 or 3 most popular plugins to that list as well.
Developer name (Plugin 1, Plugin 2)
Two things:
1. Damn, I just barely missed that top 10 list (I’m #11 if you go by downloads). Then again if I released a new version of my plugins every day/week like some authors do, I’d probably be a lot higher up that list. 😉 I’m curious to see how many users use each plugin. Since the data is sent home during update checks for the plugins, theoretically that data could be collected and released (it’d be pretty interesting to see which plugin, besides Akismet, is installed the most).
2. I thought for sure that that “25” number included plugin names/stubs I had registered on WP.org but had never bothered to get around to coding, but after looking at my list it turns out to be correct, if not lower than the real count. Wow, I write a lotta stuff. lol
@ Denis from semiologic.com : I just went to the Software section on your site that you gratiously provided to us — while I was wondering why one would decide to not host his/her plugins at wordpress.org.
Anyways… After clicking on the “Contact Form” link I got a “Coming soon…” message. Then I clicked on the “Redirect Manager” link and got the same “Coming soon…” message. Then I closed that browser window.
~Marcus
@ Navjot Singh : I suspect the API returns the author listed in the plugin’s header (i.e. “Author: asdf” in the .php file). As far as I can tell, it doesn’t include the list of contributors you see on wordpress.org.
@ Wesley : I’ll see if I can add it (though the table is already huge).
[…] Une fois n’est pas coutume, Weblog Tools Collection (en) publie une brève qui devrait en intéresser plus d’un. Il s’agit du classement des auteurs des extensions les plus téléchargées du répertoire officiel des plugins WordPress (en). Ce classement a été établi par le blog w-shadow.com. […]
@Andrew: Maybe it’s time for a plugin to reorder the WordPress Admin menus somehow…?
Shadow, I just remembered, did you know you could wrap your blog template around your cool Top 1000 list? I have a post on how to do it:
http://www.webmaster-source.com/2008/11/26/how-to-integrate-non-wordpress-pages-in-wordpress/
Then you could add a link to the page somewhere in your sidebar or horizontal navigation, and show it off more. It’s kind of a leaderboard for the plugin developers, and it’s definitely something I would want to look at again. Maybe it’s worth making a bit more…friendly?