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Jeff Chandler

How to Obtain The Total Download Count For Plugins Attached to a WordPress.org Username

Over the weekend, the Easy Digital Downloads team launched a new side project called WP Tally. WP Tally is a tool that displays the total download count for plugins attached to a WordPress.org username. The project is the result of a conversation about the lack of an easy way to determine the total amount of plugin downloads a WordPress.org user has.

WP Tally Home Page
WP Tally Home Page

Daniel Griffiths, who worked on the backend of the project, tells the Tavern, “it only took 10 minutes to come up with a name.” Sean Davis, a full-time support manager and theme developer for EDD, is credited with the name. The founder of Easy Digital Downloads, Pippin Williamson, asked Griffiths if he was interested in creating a new plugin, “I’m always looking for a new pet project, so I happily agreed.” The first version of WP Tally took about an hour and a half of development time. Due to other things going on throughout the day, the estimated time to complete the project is half a day.

The WP Tally API

While the site didn’t have an API initially, one was added after being suggested by Williamson. Griffiths says the API is public and passes the same data that is displayed on WP Tally. While the extent of what the API can do is small, the team is open to suggestions. “We’ve already had someone express interest in writing a widget to allow users to display their personal data on their own website.”

WP Tally in Action

Since Scott Reilly known as Coffee2Code on WordPress.org, has 70 plugins attached to his account, I used his name as an example. According to WP Tally, he has 911, 256 total downloads. Meanwhile, Joost de Valk has a total of 22.3 million downloads from 29 different plugins. Results are displayed in a vertical list without a way to sort them.

Coffee2Code Total Download Count
Coffee2Code Total Download Count

It would be nice to be able to sort through the list by the most downloads, most popular based on ratings, and alphabetical order. I’d also like to see the total number of plugins displayed in the same area as the total download count. As an added bonus, it would be neat if the information could be embedded into a text widget as a badge.

What do you think of the site and is there anything else you’d like to see it tally?

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17 responses to “How to Obtain The Total Download Count For Plugins Attached to a WordPress.org Username”

  5. WP Tally is great! Love it!

    But what would be even better would be if this was added to the plugins page for the wordpress.org profiles. At the moment it lists all your plugins and the download count for each, but no total or any other information for each plugin. It would be great if it looked something like WP Tally.

    I know it’s a bit rude to look at the hard work these guys have put in and then turn around and say actually this would be better on .org, but I do think that would be a better result for everyone.

    Anyway, perhaps that’s for the future. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy WP Tally! :)

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    • This might be a dumb question, but… why?

      Numbers are cool and fun to look at, but generally speaking, before I display a number, I wasn’t to know the usefulness of it, that it’s accurate, and that it has some overall meaning.

      I’m not seeing the overall value here, is all. Why does this number matter?

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      • I guess the total is mainly for plugin authors as some form of validation. I think most plugin authors are going to be interested in their total download count. I know the count includes downloads of updates, so doesn’t reflect actual usage and is therefore less meaningful, but that’s what we have at the moment.

        From the average user’s point of view, it might help them work out whether to trust a plugin author, although using total number of downloads for that that is definitely flawed. But how many average users visit a plugin author’s profile page anyway?

        Note, I wasn’t just talking about the total number. I was also talking about the other information for each plugin. I know when I looked my WP Tally page, I saw a couple of the plugins had Last Updated dates from 2009! A bit of a wake up call! Also seeing the average rating for each of your plugins very quickly from one spot was interesting as well.

        This sort of stuff would help users decide whether to trust a plugin author (if they ever visit this page).

        Is there a good reason not to display last updated, average rating etc, on this page? I’m asking that genuinely, as I’m guessing wordpress.org needs to take a lot of things into consideration from a performance point of view. I think it would be useful.

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  8. I was working on a personal site two weeks ago and had a need for pulling total download counts (total from today, as well as all time downloads ) from the repo, and displaying it nicely in my sidebar. I ended up writing a custom widget to do just that.

    Wp plugin download counter

    I didn’t know there was a real need to display repo stats on a users site, or I may have gone ahead and done something similar!

    Great job to the team over at EDD!

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  11. Great idea, great site. :-)

    How about a widget showing the users with most downloads?

    Just the ones that have been searched, so it won’t need any cron actions ;-)

    I am posting with my WordPress.com account as the G+ account didn’t seem to work.

    (Oddly nor the WP account worked for Firefox, I am trying with Chrome now)

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