Top 10 Plugin Developers Of 2009
The end of a year is a time for reflection. A time to look back on your accomplishments, and also a time to give thanks to the people who helped you along the way. So, once again, I’ve compiled a list of the top WP developers whose plugins have been an immense boon to thousands of bloggers. Thank you, from all of us 🙂
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.
- Michael Torbert
4 534 779 downloads. Co-author of the most downloaded plugin ever, All In One SEO Pack. - Arne Brachnold
2 968 046 downloads. Author of the wildly popular Google XML Sitemaps plugin. - Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
2 303 984 downloads. Author of WP-PageNavi and other cool plugins. - Matt Mullenweg
2 194 744 downloads. Matt is the founding developer of WordPress, and has also created many highly acclaimed plugins. - Alex Rabe
1 655 442 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery. - Andy Skelton
1 508 312 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. - Takayuki Miyoshi
1 365 010 downloads. Author of Contact Form 7. - Joost de Valk
1 154 124 downloads. Author of Google Analytics for WP and dozens of other plugins. - Donncha O Caoimh
1 059 256 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache, and many more. - Vladimir Prelovac
845 346 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube and many other plugins.
Special Mentions
- Most prolific plugin author : Scott Reily has 44 plugins hosted on WordPress.org.
- Most user ratings : Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachnold, with over 800 votes and an average rating of 4 ½ stars.
- Most confusing data point : Sociable. This extremely popular plugin has changed hands three times now, going from Peter Harkins to Joost de Valk, and most recently to the privacy-loving folks of Blogplay.com. I omitted it from the Top 10, but you can still find it in the Top 1000.
By the way, I’m #24 on the Top 1000 list. Yay 🙂
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It’s stunning to note how, compared to the 2008 list you posted (http://w-shadow.com/blog/2008/12/28/top-10-wordpress-plugin-developers/), the numbers of downloads essentially quadrupled on average.
Stunning growth of WP, and rightfully so!
Yay, I’m on #60. Not too bad on a list of 1000. 🙂
@ Artem : It really is impressive. Last year, only one author on the Top 10 list was anywhere near 1 000 000 downloads. This year, all but one have more than a million downloads.
@ Oliver : Not bad indeed.
What method do you use to build this list?
Are we looking at the top 1000 downloaded plugins and there authors or is it a combination of all their plugins?
I am curious as the downloads of one of my plugins is in the 7000 region and you numbers for downloads don’t match the current numbers for other plugins too – for example you have 106 387 for http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-contact-form/stats/ which only has 91000 at the moment.
I used the (mostly undocumented) plugin directory API to obtain information about all plugins hosted on wordpress.org. Then I did some pre-processing and dumped the plugin info into a MySQL database. Finally, I ran a bunch of aggregate queries to construct the Top 10 list. I can send you the source code if you’re interested.
The number of downloads is a combination of all their plugins. So, while my DB currently shows only 90 964 downloads for WP Contact Form (it’s lower than the wp.org figure because my script caches the results for 24 hours), it does add up to 106 387 when you also consider the other seven plugins.
Thanks for the mention =)
congrats on 24th – by no means a small feat 😀
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