We just passed a bit of a milestone at WPMU DEV, over 100,000 downloads of our plugins freely released at WordPress.org.

Sure, there are plenty of individual plugins on the repository with numbers well over that individually, but the fact that we’ve done that in the space of a few months and clearly met some pretty significant needs within the WP community, while we’ve been at it, is surely cause for some celebration :)

The numbers

Our top 5 downloaded plugins have been:

• Membership – currently with 24,367 downloads, it’s our only slightly limited version of the best hotdamn membership plugin on the planet
• The Google +1 Plugin – a complete, feature rich, +1 plugin that does everything it says it will, and more, with 17,545 downloads
• MarketPress – everything you could want in an ecommerce plugin, that’s also easy to use and very aesthetically pleasing, with 12,815
• Chat – 12,004 downloads for what is simply a great chat plugin, chat in posts, pages or bottom corners of your site… for free
• BuddyPress Activity Plus – Nothing ‘lite’ here, a complete BuddyPress activity plugin, with 9,824 downloads

And that’s just getting started, we’ve also got really successful wiki, Q&A and popup plugins… not to mention the one I’m most proud of, Anti Splog.

Why do I like anti splog so much… well, not only is it installed and running on 1,675 separate Multisite installs, but has sorted out a massive 1,048,998 blogs – and that’s not even counting the immeasurable numbers it’s stopped from being able to sign up at all!

It’s essentially made it so that splogging has moved from being an automated to a manual activity, and one which you’re now going to get caught at… and there are some great improvements coming to it too shortly as well.

Giving back

But perhaps the coolest thing, for me at least, is that I hope this is a clear demonstration of WPMU DEV’s commitment to the WordPress community, to providing quality, supported and bloody good plugins for free.

Of course, you can also sign up for a bunch more as well as the odd extra feature and support, for less than $35 / month, should you wish :) But we reckon that of that 100k downloads, there are at least 95k folk who have got exactly what they need from us, without a penny changing hands, and that’s kinda cool to be able to do that as part of a sustainable business strategy.

So, what now…

Well, I reckon this is just getting started.

We’ve already got a bunch of new releases for WordPress.org queued up and ready, with a little polishing, to let fly.

In fact, by the end of this year I’d like to see us double the number of plugins we have hosted there, and hopefully the next time I post something like this, we’ll be looking at our first million downloads.

We’re also some way to getting our first theme up there too.

And of course, if you want to help, you’re always welcome to recommend our WordPress.org plugins to your friends and readers, drop by the ones you like and give them a 5 star rating or just send us some good vibes!

Feature image cc CharlesFred