About WP Manifest

Why

A growing number of plugin authors distribute their work themselves. Their plugins update through their own updaters, their readmes live in the repository, and nobody ranks them. WordPress.org cannot see them, and a forge's topic pages cannot tell a plugin from a tutorial or a re-upload of somebody else's work. WP Manifest fills that gap with an index that is crawled, verified and ranked automatically, covering only the plugins their authors ship themselves.

How plugins get in

1. Hunt. GitHub, GitLab and Codeberg searches for repositories tagged wordpress-plugin (and neighbours), every Packagist package typed wordpress-plugin resolved back to its repository, plus GitHub code search for files carrying a Plugin Name: header. Every hit is a candidate.
2. Confirm. The root of each candidate is read and every root-level PHP file is parsed for a WordPress plugin header the same way WordPress core does it. No header, no listing. Forks and boilerplates are rejected, and repositories that describe themselves as a mirror or copy are set aside.
3. Refresh. Stars, activity and every release's asset download counts are re-read weekly, and each plugin is checked against the WordPress.org directory so anything published there drops out of the listings.
4. Classify. AI agents read the header, GitHub topics, readme and release data and file each plugin into one of 24 fixed categories with a confidence and a written rationale. The same pass decides whether a repository is the author's primary home, a mirror of someone else's plugin (Composer copies, re-uploads of paid plugins), or a vendor's documentation repo whose installable build ships elsewhere. Only primary repositories are listed. Anything that fails validation is dropped rather than stored.
5. Rank. One score per plugin, recomputed after every refresh.

Ranking

Score = 10·log₁₀(stars+1) + 6·log₁₀(active sites+1) + 3·log₁₀(release downloads+1) + 2·log₁₀(Composer installs+1) + a recency term that decays to zero over two years without a push + a small bonus for publishing real releases. Archived repositories are halved. Stars carry the most weight because every repository has them; release downloads only exist for authors who attach a zip to their releases, so they add on top instead of gating.

Active-site estimate

A self-hosted updater only ever serves the current release, so the download count of a release that has since been superseded is the number of distinct sites that updated during its reign. The largest such closed cohort in the trailing 30 days is a lower bound on the active fleet. While fewer than three closed cohorts exist in that window, the median of the last five closed releases stands in. The newest release is still accumulating and never counts. Only assets ending in .zip count as plugin downloads. This is the same estimator Minn Admin uses for its own numbers. GitLab does not publish asset download counts, so GitLab-hosted plugins have no estimate.

What is not here

Nothing is hosted. Every install command points at the author's own release. There is no vetting of code quality or security beyond the header check; WP Registry tracks disclosures for many of these plugins.

Plugins already in the WordPress.org directory

They are not listed here. Every confirmed repository is checked against WordPress.org, and a plugin published there is filtered out, because it already has a directory and an install button inside every WordPress admin. What is left is the part nobody indexes: the plugins an author distributes themselves. The check runs in the background and is never shown on a listing.

Numbers right now

4,712 listed · 3,328 filtered out as wp.org listings · 350 mirrors · 61 docs-only · 5,350 awaiting confirmation · 2,582 rejected

Not an official WordPress project

WP Manifest is an independent project by Austin Ginder. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the WordPress Foundation, WordPress.org or Automattic. WordPress is a registered trademark of the WordPress Foundation. Plugin names, descriptions and statistics belong to their authors and are shown here to help people find their work.

Corrections

Everything here is crawled and classified automatically, so some of it is wrong. If a listing misrepresents your plugin, is filed under the wrong category, or should not be here at all, email feedback@wpmanifest.xyz and it gets fixed by hand.

API

Everything on the site is available as JSON at https://wpmanifest.xyz/wp-json/wp-manifest/v1/plugins with category, search, owner, sort, page parameters, plus /plugins/{owner}/{repo}, /categories and /stats.