The WordPress Repository facelift

Every once in a while, I am – like every other WordPress plugin author – checking the download statistics for my plugin. So, I noticed today some very nice changes in the WordPress repository. First of all, we have now a chart, which is displaying, which versions of a plugin is currently in use.
So you can see, for example, right now around 70 percent of the active installations are still running version 1.01. Since the 1.03 has been published just a few days ago, I guess/hope, this number will shrink and shrink.

Before this repository-update, you were able to see in the right sidebar, how often the plugin had been downloaded. Although, this is a quite interesting number, far more interesting is to know, how many WordPress blogs are actually using the plugin. The repository doesn’t give an exact number but an approximate value, so in my case more than 300 running versions. The number of total downloads is still given, but underneath in the download history section. This is right now more than 2.000.

After changing the rating system in the repository, by removing all ratings without a review in the mid of February, this is the next step Automattic undertakes, to improve the WordPress repository.