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. […] created the most sought-after WordPress plugins for 2008. Fortunately, W-Shadow.com has compiled a list of the top WordPress plugin developers using rankings from the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin […]

  2. White Shadow says:

    @ redwall_hp : Reorder admin menus… like this?

    I suspect the table would become broken in new and exciting ways if I wrap it inside the blog’s theme. Design/layout is always a pain for me 😉

  3. Sara the Wordpress User says:

    This is a fantastic list; kudos to everyone on the top 10! All of you guys are among the reasons that WordPress is such an awesome piece of software and a top-notch tool for designers like me.

    I’m looking forward to even more greatness in 2009!

  4. I’d like to thank all of the authors. They’re making WordPress a much better experience.

    THANK YOU ALL!

  5. Denis says:

    @Viper, yeah, it’s the number of released plugins. I’ve over 40 registered on wp-plugins.org, but I’ve yet to release a dozen on them. 😉

    D.

  6. Dr. House says:

    I think that Matt and Lester are winners! Matt developed wordpress and Lester has several plugin it means more downloads 😉

  7. I think we all are winners. Thanks the the authors there are more users.

    And because there are more users, authors do their best to make the next big plugin.

    Luckily, with WordPress it has been a endless circle so far.

  8. redwall_hp says:

    @Shadow, *exactly* like that. I’ll have to try that plugin out sometime… 🙂

  9. […] is not something that i researched about, but found a list that was prepared by a plugin creator, White Shadow who created the list with the plugins which had the highest […]

  10. […] 原文:Top 10 WordPress Plugin Developers […]

  11. […] Top 10 WordPress Plugin Developers: Disusun berdasarkan berapa kali plugin bikinan orang yang bersangkutan diunduh dari direktori WordPress Plugins. Orang Indonesia gak ada yang masuk ya? (info via Weblog Tools Collection) Baca juga: WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 […]

  12. 2mk says:

    All In One SEO Pack is good plugin, He is on the top.

  13. Utkarsh says:

    I’m 60 😀
    Thanks for the list.

  14. Mark Barnes says:

    Hmm, interesting. I’m #485! There is a bug, though. It’s showing my most popular plugin wrong. It should be SermonBrowser with 3,263 downloads, not Quick Admin Links with 361. (See http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/mark8barnes)

  15. White Shadow says:

    @ Mark : Okay, I’ll check my algorithm when I have time.

  16. […] 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 […]

  17. […] Shadow has recently compiled a list of top 1000 WordPress plugin authors based on number of downloads. There are 2190 authors in total, and I rank at 843th position with […]

  18. Fu4ny says:

    Fu4ny and Funnnny are the same. Just a mistake by WordPress plugin repo’s name listing

  19. […] walking and we are moving now to out new flat. I’m also very impressed to be one of the TOP 10 WordPress Plugin developer in 2008 (and he only count the NextGEN Gallery downloads, without wordTube and wp-Table). Filed […]

  20. Matt says:

    Any chance you could update the Top 1000 list more frequently? If not, could you go more in depth about how you used the plugin API? I could see this list getting pretty addictive 🙂

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