14 DAY TRIAL // With Mozilla just celebrating two billion add-on downloads, another web-centric company is marking a similar milestone. WordPress has just announced the 100th million plugin has now been downloaded. It’s a smaller milestone but just as impressive if not even more so, since blogging tools are not going to have the same mainstream audience or appeal as a web browser. WordPress is also celebrating a smaller milestone, the newly launched WordPress 3.0 has just passed three million downloads.
There are now a little over 10,000 plugins in the WordPress directory which really puts the 100 million downloads number in perspective. Of course, some plugins are more popular than others, but it does indicate that bloggers are very interested in the added functionality these plugins provide.
The most popular plugin is the antispam tool Akismet with over 8.5 million downloads to date. The tool comes pre-installed with WordPress, so that may explain its popularity, although, these installs may not be counted as downloads. However, later updates are probably counted. Other popular plugins are the All in One SEO Pack with five million downloads and Google XML Sitemaps with close to four million.
Given the popularity of WordPress plugins, it’s no surprise that they are now getting some attention from the development team. Having wrapped up WordPress 3.0, the team decided to focus on some of the things surrounding WordPress rather than the software itself.
“The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory,” Andrew Nacin, a WordPress developer, announced.
“We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins,” he explained.
WordPress 3.0 is available for download here.