As the year ends, it’s time to see which plugin developers created the most sought-after WordPress plugins for 2008. Fortunately, W-Shadow.com has compiled a list of the top WordPress plugin developers using rankings from the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin directory.

And here are the top 10 Wordpress Plugin Developers for 2008:

1. Michael Torbert
   961 306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose).
2. Matt Mullenweg
   921 827 downloads. Everybody knows Matt, the main WP dev and author of Akismet.
3. Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
   775 220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls and other cool plugins.
4. Arne Brachhold
   628 350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
5. Andy Skelton
   449 345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. Another dedicated hacker.
6. Alex Rabe
   429 705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery, etc.
7. Oliver Seidel
   361 918 downloads. Author of cforms II.
8. Joost de Valk
   328 036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP and numerous other tools.
9. Donncha O Caoimh
   246 752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache and other assorted plugins.
10. Vladimir Prelovac
    244 963 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube, various SEO plugins, and more.

Special Mentions

• Most plugins by a single author : Viper007Bond has 25 plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
• Highest version number : cforms II version 9.4 by Oliver Seidel. This plugin also has the highest number of user ratings - 419 votes.
• Longest plugin name : Sliding Post - Slides latest posts with Carousel effect (55 characters) by dasinfomedia
• Shortest plugin name : mu by Mark Bockenstedt. That’s not WordPress MU - “mu” is an obscure microblog updater plugin.

Check out the top 1000 as well!