W-Shadow.com

I had some free time this weekend, so I built an automatically updated list of Top 100 WordPress plugin developers. The rankings are based on the number of times each developers’ plugins have been downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory. A short PHP script updates the list several times per day. Check it out.

Bonus: Compare it to this Top 10 list from 2008.

I had already written a script for downloading and parsing WordPress.org plugin directory data when I was building my Related Plugin Search app, so that part was easy. Displaying the rankings was also simple – just take all the plugins, GROUP BY author, then ORDER BY SUM(downloads) DESC and generate a plain HTML table from the results. Finally, slap on some Twitter Bootstrap goodness to make it look decent (really, that thing is a godsend for design-impaired coders like me).

As it turns out, the hardest part was actually figuring out who to credit as the author of each plugin. Many popular plugins have more than one developer working on them and it’s not really feasible to evaluate the relative value of their contributions (so to say) with a PHP script.

To solve this, I decided to use a simple heuristic: if a plugin’s readme.txt includes a “Contributors” header, assume the contributor who’s listed first is the main author. If the plugin doesn’t have any contributors listed or the first contributor doesn’t have a WordPress.org profile, use the developer who originally submitted the plugin to the directory instead. This seemed to produce fairly reasonable results overall.