We first start with the comparison between the four popular content management systems on the market : WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Movable Type. 2009 is the year WordPress passed Joomla for the first time according Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), an easy way to see how often certain topics have been searched on Google over time. One year ago there was a huge difference between Joomla and WordPress, but according Google Trends in 2009 WordPress became the most popular CMS/blogging platform in the world, in both search volume as news reference volume. See the graph below for a comparison between WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Movable Type :

comparison WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal vs Movable Type

That’s not all, a *huge* amount of new plugins were released in the past year for WordPress, let’s check some numbers :

In January 2009 there were 4,000 plugins available in the plugin directory at WordPress.org, it’s one year later now and the quantity almost doubled ! Thanks so much to all the authors who have given so much to the WordPress community !

Top 20 of the most popular WordPress plugins of 2009

Let’s take a look at the most popular WordPress plugins. Below you will find the top 20 of the most downloaded WP plugins up to 1/1/2010, ordered by total number of downloads at WordPress.org (number of downloads is updated in realtime). Below the small description of each plugin you can find links which go to the plugin’s homepage, or you can download the plugin directly from WordPress.org.

1.  All in One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

2.  Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

3.  Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

4.  NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

5.  Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

6.  WordPress.com Stats

You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.

7.  WP Super Cache

A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

8.  Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

9.  Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

10.  Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more.

11.  Google Analyticator

Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. Includes widgets for Analytics data display.

12.  WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.

13.  Viper’s Video Quicktags

Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more.

14.  cformsII – contact form

cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin (& comment form)!

15.  Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box.

16.  Page Flip Image Gallery

FlippingBook WordPress Gallery plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your blog.

17.  GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

18.  WP-DB-Backup

On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

19.  WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

20.  WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

Above you can see the top 20 WP plugins in a graph, in blue you can see the number of downloads, in red the rating the plugin received at WordPress.org

Top 20 WordPress plugin developers of 2009

Let’s read some more information about the top 20 WordPress plugin authors, ranked by the number of downloads from the WordPress.org plugin directory (this list is manually verified, and we have added photographs of most of the plugin authors ).


1.Michael Torberttotal downloads : 4,569,172

Michael is famous for his plugin All in One SEO Pack, the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. A summary of all his plugins : All in One SEO Pack, WP Security Scan, SMS Text Message, Auto Google Chrome Frame, Clean WP Head, Display Name Author Permalink, Moderate Selected Posts and Free Kareem.

2.Arne Brachholdtotal downloads : 2,997,946

Arne’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin is one most of us have installed on our blog, and a very popular one. His other plugins are Google XML Sitemaps with qTranslate Support, A9 SiteInfo Generator, ImageShack Uploader and del.icio.us – Bookmark this!

3.Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chantotal downloads : 2,320,286

The plugin WP-PageNavi is known by a lot of WP users. Lester’s total downloads are not mostly based on this plugin, but several different ones. A summary of his plugins, which are of high quality (we use them a lot!) : WP-PostViews, WP-PostRatings, WP-UserOnline, WP-Polls, WP-Print, WP-RelativeDate, WP-ServerInfo, WP-Stats, WP-Sticky, WP-PluginsUsed, WP-EMail, WP-DownloadManager, WP-CommentNavi, WP-DBManager, WP-Ban and WP-Wap.

4.Matt Mullenwegtotal downloads : 2,205,502

Due to the plugin author at position #4 you and I have a WordPress blog: Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and Automattic. Thank you Matt for the best blogging software out there, hands down! A summary of the plugins he created also for all of us : HyperDB, Akismet, Close Old Posts, SyntaxHighlighter Plus, Yahoo Autotag, Twitter Friends, Top Comments, Matt’s Community Tags, Random Redirect, Hello Dolly, Sympathy for the Devil, Google Adsense for Feeds, Cache Images, Advanced Caching, fauxML, Admin IP Watcher, No WWW, Firefox Counter, WYSIWYG Editing, Staticize Reloaded, Blogtimes and Protect old posts.

5.Alex Rabetotal downloads : 1,665,064

At number 5 the author of the most downloaded (and very good!) WordPress Gallery plugin NextGEN Gallery, Alex Rabe from Germany. Besides his famous gallery plugin for WordPress Alex released also these plugins : WP-Memory-Usage, wordTube and WP-Table.

6.Andy Skeltontotal downloads : 1,651,593

Andy Skelton is the author of the WordPress.com Stats plugin, and also some other plugins : WordPress.com Custom CSS, Bad Behavior and Sidebar Widgets.

7.Takayuki Miyoshitotal downloads : 1,377,141

At #7 the Japanese author of the famous Contact Form 7 plugin. Takayuki is also the developer of these WP plugins : Really Simple CAPTCHA, Support Tickets, Acts as Group, Bogo and Camper.

8.Joost de Valktotal downloads : 1,168,344

The founding developer of the famous Sociable plugin also created another very popular plugin : Google Analytics for WordPress, and many more : Robots Meta, Clicky, SlideShare, RSS Footer, Plugin Downloads, Yoast Breadcrumbs, Blog Icons, Enhanced WP Contact Form, RSS Shortcode, Simple Taxonomies, Users to CSV, Blog Metrics, Customize Your Community, Canonical URL’s, Optimize DB, Tweetbacks, Permalink Redirect, Twitter Link, Minimum Comment Length, Upcoming, Social Profiles, Search Suggest, CrunchBase Widget, Email Commenters, Comment Redirect, adCenter Analytics and From RSS.

9.Donncha O Caoimhtotal downloads : 1,084,522

Donncha is well know for his WP Super Cache plugin and has many more useful plugins : WordPress Exploit Scanner, WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages, WordPress MU Domain Mapping, Unfiltered MU, Cookies for Comments, Tweet Tweet, WP-Hashcash, Theme Tester, Comment Referrers, Blog Voyeur, Flickr Comment Importer, fauxML and Flickr Widget.

10.Blogplaytotal downloads : 885,980

Number 10 is for Blogplay, who recently acquired the very popular social bookmarking plugin Sociable from WordPress from Joost de Valk. Besides Sociable Blogplay also released the WP plugins WP RoSocial and INFOmoz-Glossario.

11.Vladimir Prelovactotal downloads : 850,250

Vladimir is well known for these WordPress plugins : Smart YouTube, SEO Smart Links and SEO Friendly Images. Other plugins developed by him are Snazzy Archives, Category Search, Show Me Options, WP Figlet, WP Nofollow Categories, Yahoo News Feed, JavaScript to Footer, Plugin Central, Insights, Live Blogroll, Theme Test Drive, SEO Super Comments, WP Digg This, Navbar, No Frames and WP Wall.

12.Add to Anytotal downloads : 822,270

Add to Any is the company behind the well known social bookmark plugin Add to Any. Besides this plugin they also developed the WP plugin Add to Any: Subscribe Button.

13.Ronald Hefttotal downloads : 770,438

Author of Google Analyticator and four other plugins : TSG Podcasting Plugin, Pownce for WordPress, Full Text Feed and Akismet Spam Count.

14.Alex Kingtotal downloads : 755,684

Alex King is known as the original developer of the ShareThis plugin, and ofcourse Twitter Tools. A long list of all his other plugins for WordPress : 404 Notifier, Analytics360, AnswerLinks, Articles, Category Overload, Comment License, Delink Comment Author, Drafts Dropdown, Link Harvest, Old Post Alert, PhoneFactor, Popularity Contest, Progressive License, Shortcut Macros, Tag Uncomplete, Vote-the-Post, WP Grins, WP Plugin Auto-Loader, WP Since Last Visit, WP Style Switcher, WP Unformatted, WordPress HelpCenter, WordPress Mobile Edition, Yahoo! Shortcuts, Zannel Tools and tagaroo.

15.Viper007Bondtotal downloads : 699,638

Viper007Bond -his real name is Alex- is the author with the most number of plugins in this top 20, a total of 35. He is well know for the plugin Viper’s Video Quicktags. A summary of all his other plugins : Allow Numeric Stubs, BBCode, Battlefield 2 Stats, Breadcrumb Titles For Pages, Chili Code Highlighter, Clean Archives Reloaded, Dashboard Fixer, Dashboard Widget Manager, Dashboard: Draft Posts, Dashboard: Latest Spam, Dashboard: Pending Review, Dashboard: Scheduled Posts, Direct Image URLs For Galleries, Disable Theme Preview, Disable Trackbacks, Enable oEmbed Discovery, Global Plugin Update Notice, Local Time, More To The Top, Regenerate Thumbnails, Registered Users Only, SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, SyntaxHighlighter Plus, Templatedia, Templatedia Chess, Twitter Tools: bit.ly Links, Viper’s Plugins Used, WPhone, WordPress Admin Bar, WordPress Download Counter, WordPress.org One-Click Install, YOURLS: Short URL Widget, jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries and oohEmbed.

16.John Godleytotal downloads : 649,630

John is most known for his great SEO plugin for WordPress HeadSpace2 SEO and ofcourse Redirection. Besides these plugins he also developed AJAX Calendar, Search Unleashed, Gravatar Widget, HTML Purified, Advanced Permalinks, Audit Trail, Search Regex, Tidy Up, Drain Hole, Sniplets, User Permissions, Drain Hole, PageView, Jump To, InScript and Google Ad Wrap.

17.Manoj Thulasidastotal downloads : 520,174

Manoj is the author of the Easy Adsense plugin, and also WP plugins like AdSense Now!, Easy AdSense Redux, AdSense Now! Redux, Easy Translator, Theme Tweaker and Easy LaTeX.

18.Milan Petrovictotal downloads : 463,991

Milan is a succesfull WP developer with many popular plugins for WordPress, and mostly known for GD Star Rating, the most popular rating plugin for WordPress (read here our review : GD Star Rating). Other plugins he developed : GD Broken Report, GD LinkedIn Badge, GD Pages Navigator, GD Plugin Core, GD Press Tools, GD Simple Widgets and GD Taxonomies Tools.

19.Oliver Seideltotal downloads : 428,550

Oliver Seidel is the author of the cformsII contact form plugin. The latest versions of this plugin can de downloaded only at his own site, so the total number of downloads are not accurate.

20.Austin Matzkototal downloads : 432,983

Austin is the plugin author of WP-DP-Backup. Besides his WP-DB-Backup plugin he also developed these plugins for WordPress : Categories in Tag Cloud, Filosofo Comments Preview, Filosofo Enroll Comments, Filosofo Gravatars, Filosofo Home-Page Control, Filosofo Old-Style Upload, GZIP output, SEO for Paged Comments and Theme Switcher.

Summary of the top 20 WordPress plugin authors

Here above you will see a chart and table of the top 20 WordPress plugin authors. Enough numbers for now, we have to write some posts about all the new and updated plugins released the past week. We hope you liked this post, and we are very curious what the numbers will be next year. If you like this post please show your appreciation by adding it to one of the social bookmarking networks below or retweet it !