Oldest WordPress Plugins in the WordPress.org Repository
WordPress made its debut in the expansive year of 2003. As 2004 drew to a close, the first plugins began to populate its repository. In our quest to explore the inaugural year of plugins, we turned to the WordPress.org API to compile a comprehensive list.
The very first plugin to grace the repository was Blogtimes, created by Matt Mullenweg, the visionary behind the initial version of WordPress and the founder of Automattic.
While it's unsurprising that many of these early-day plugins have faded into obscurity, it's fascinating to note that some have stood the test of time and remain remarkably popular, such as Akismet.
Toggle the table into full-screen mode now and delve into this retrospective journey.
Plugin | Author | Total downloads | Active installs | Published | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Text Filter Suite Advanced filtering functions for WordPress, including the Talk Like a Pirate Day filters. | Dougal Campbell | 5.121 | 0 | 2004-12-10 | 2015-06-03 |
2. Blogtimes This plugin generates a bar graph image showing when posts are made during a period of time. For this to work wp-images/blogtimes.png must be writable by the web server. Original code by Sanjay Sheth of sastools.com. | Matt Mullenweg | 2.189 | 10 | 2004-12-10 | 2005-01-20 |
3. Registered Only Registered only is a plugin to make all of your WordPress powered weblog/site protected. Once this plugin is enabled, the WordPress powered site or we … | Carthik Sharma | 15.051 | 10 | 2004-12-11 | 2005-05-12 |
4. WP Unformatted The WP Unformatted plugin allows you to remove WordPress's smart quotes (texturize) and auto XHTML tags (autop) functionality on a per-post basis … | Alex King | 15.296 | 300 | 2004-12-13 | 2022-06-24 |
5. Front Page Categories Select categories to display on the front page. | Ryan Boren | 13.617 | 30 | 2004-12-17 | 2007-10-05 |
6. Theme Switcher Allow users to switch which theme they use on your WordPress, WordPress MU, or BuddyPress site. | Ryan Boren | 53.040 | 300 | 2004-12-17 | 2009-11-09 |
7. Top/Recent Commenters Retrieve the top commenters or most recent commenters to your site (if called outside "the loop") or for a particular post (if called inside "the loop"). | Scott Reilly | 2.273 | 10 | 2004-12-21 | 2005-03-25 |
8. Hide/Cut Post Text Hide (so no one, or only users above a certain userlevel, can see) or cut (so only viewable on post's permalink page) portion(s) of post text. Link text for cuts can be defined per-cut or omitted, and if used, cut links are uniquely anchored. Quicktag buttons for the new tags facilitate use (but c... | Scott Reilly | 7.938 | 20 | 2004-12-21 | 2005-04-08 |
9. Customizable Post Listings Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things. | Scott Reilly | 29.687 | 1.000 | 2004-12-21 | 2016-11-21 |
10. Text Replace Replace text with other text. Handy for creating shortcuts to common, lengthy, or frequently changing text/HTML, or for smilies. | Scott Reilly | 77.784 | 4.000 | 2004-12-21 | 2021-07-12 |
11. Random File Retrieve the name, path, or link to a randomly chosen file or files in a specified directory. | Scott Reilly | 26.953 | 100 | 2004-12-21 | 2023-08-22 |
12. Get Custom Field Values Use widgets, shortcodes, and/or template tags to easily retrieve and display custom field values for posts or pages. | Scott Reilly | 127.783 | 2.000 | 2004-12-21 | 2023-10-10 |
13. Post-to-Post Links Easily create a link to another post using a shortcode to reference the post by id or slug; the link text is the post's title, unless overridden. | Scott Reilly | 10.223 | 70 | 2004-12-21 | 2018-06-10 |
14. Category Image(s) Display an image for each category associated with a post. | Scott Reilly | 29.820 | 100 | 2004-12-21 | 2012-06-11 |
15. Rate it! A collection of functions that allow you to add a rating to each post. | Chris J. Davis | 10.212 | 10 | 2004-12-21 | 2005-05-13 |
16. Live Preview: Admin Panel, Comments A plugin that creates a live preview for you comments and post/edit forms. | Chris J. Davis | 1.626 | 10 | 2004-12-21 | 2004-12-28 |
17. Per Post Comment Text A plugin that allows you to set the text of your comments link on a post per post basis. Thanks to rgh (http://www.frenzieddaddy.com/) and the rest on #wordpress for thier help. For directions on how to use this plugin click here. | Chris J. Davis | 2.242 | 10 | 2004-12-21 | 2004-12-28 |
18. Seperation Anxiety Seperate those tracks and pings. | Chris J. Davis, Scott Merill | 1.089 | 0 | 2004-12-21 | 2005-06-16 |
19. Protect old posts This plugin puts a password specified in the protect-old.php file on every post but the latest published one that doesn't already have a password. | Matt Mullenweg | 1.561 | 0 | 2004-12-26 | 2004-12-26 |
20. WP Gallery Replace WP Gallery tags with links and images in your Gallery albums. | Geoff Hutchison | 12.557 | 60 | 2005-01-03 | 2017-01-30 |
21. WP-CC WP-CC is a plugin for the WordPress publishing system that enables easy usage of Creative Commons licenses. It can output a text or image link to you … | Firas Durri | 2.942 | 10 | 2005-01-11 | 2005-06-26 |
22. Search Hilite When someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or WordPress' own, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin. Packaged by Matt. | Ryan Boren | 11.571 | 90 | 2005-01-11 | 2005-06-17 |
23. Recent Posts Retrieves a list of the most recent posts. | Nick Momrik | 58.205 | 600 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
24. Recent Comments Creates functions to assist in displaying a list of the most recent comments. | Automattic | 30.783 | 300 | 2005-01-13 | 2021-02-10 |
25. Post Word Count Counts the total number of words in all posts or the number of words in a single post. | Nick Momrik | 5.983 | 30 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
26. Post Count Counts the number of posts. | Nick Momrik | 9.514 | 90 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
27. Most Commented Widget Add a widget to display a list of the posts/pages with the most comments. | Nick Momrik | 115.824 | 600 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
28. Moderate Trackbacks Automatically puts all trackbacks into the comment moderation queue. | Nick Momrik | 2.800 | 40 | 2005-01-13 | 2010-06-04 |
29. Moderate Pingbacks Automatically puts all pingbacks into the comment moderation queue. | Nick Momrik | 3.076 | 50 | 2005-01-13 | 2010-06-04 |
30. Last Modified Displays the date ad time the post/page was last modified. | Nick Momrik | 6.704 | 100 | 2005-01-13 | 2010-06-04 |
31. Comment Word Count Outputs the total number of words in all comments. | Nick Momrik | 2.653 | 0 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
32. Comment Plugger Gives a list of that last people to comment on a post, with a link to their site if they provided one. | Nick Momrik | 5.732 | 10 | 2005-01-13 | 2010-06-04 |
33. Comment Count Counts the number of comments. | Nick Momrik | 7.827 | 30 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
34. Card Converter Replace playing card abbreviations with a CSS playing card. | Nick Momrik | 2.936 | 10 | 2005-01-13 | 2015-12-08 |
35. Bunny’s Technorati Tags Allows easy addition to a post of a space-separated list of tags which can be displayed with adequate Technorati links in the template. Can display keywords instead if no tags are available. | Stephanie Booth | 6.613 | 10 | 2005-01-20 | 2006-01-03 |
36. Disable WPautop Disables the wpautop function for the_content and the_excerpt | Nick Momrik | 38.353 | 3.000 | 2005-01-20 | 2015-12-08 |
37. Comments Posted Elsewhere Retrieves a list of comments posted on other sites (with the help of a hidden post and trackbacks). | Nick Momrik | 2.037 | 0 | 2005-01-20 | 2010-06-04 |
38. Basic Bilingual Allows you to set the language of individual posts and pages and to summarize | Stephanie Booth | 13.465 | 10 | 2005-01-23 | 2018-05-18 |
39. Staticize Reloaded Staticize Reloaded is a plugin to make your site faster by caching the output of some WordPress pages. It creates a unique key based on the page varia … | Matt Mullenweg | 2.287 | 0 | 2005-02-01 | 2005-03-08 |
40. Cache Images Goes through your posts and gives you the option to cache all hotlinked images from a domain locally in your upload folder | Matt Mullenweg | 48.075 | 2.000 | 2005-02-08 | 2023-10-25 |
41. WordPress Heat Map Template tags for a heat map of category links, archive links and author links. This version is for WordPress 1.5 "Strayhorn", version 1.0 of this plugin is still compatible with WordPress 1.2 "Mingus". | Christoph Wimmer | 2.406 | 10 | 2005-02-11 | 2005-02-17 |
42. GeshiSyntaxColorer Program languages colorer based on GeSHI engine | Mikhail Kyurshin | 1.595 | 0 | 2005-02-19 | 2005-05-03 |
43. TTLB Ecosystem Cache This is to replace the javascript tag that the TTLB Ecosystem currently provides to display your sites current status in the Ecosystem. It caches the results every 24 hours so as to reduce load times. | Glenn Slaven | 837 | 0 | 2005-02-25 | 2005-07-04 |
44. Verse Of The Day Displays a daily bible verse on your site, using a Verse of the Day RSS feed. | Glenn Slaven | 8.754 | 40 | 2005-03-01 | 2007-05-20 |
45. iCal Events Display upcoming events from a shared calendar. | Daniel Westermann-Clark | 15.059 | 40 | 2005-03-10 | 2011-10-02 |
46. HTTP Authentication Use an external authentication source in WordPress. | Daniel Westermann-Clark | 39.423 | 700 | 2005-03-10 | 2024-04-24 |
47. Link Library The purpose of this plugin is to add the ability to output a list of link categories and a complete list of links with notes and descriptions. | Yannick Lefebvre | 2.269.085 | 10.000 | 2005-03-17 | 2024-03-31 |
48. PhotoPress Making WordPress work for photographers with beautiful image galleries, slideshows, meta-data tools, and more. | Peter Adams | 14.977 | 100 | 2005-03-18 | 2021-12-14 |
49. WYSIWYG Editing This plugin activates WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing for different fields in WordPress. It is based on the widgEditor. | Matt Mullenweg | 22.357 | 100 | 2005-03-24 | 2005-03-24 |
50. Firefox Counter This allows you to put the firefox_count() function in your template to get the latest download count for everyone's favorite browser. Call like firefox_count('thunderbird') to get the count for Thunderbird. | Matt Mullenweg | 1.698 | 0 | 2005-04-04 | 2005-04-18 |
51. Singular By default in Wordpress 1.5 and onwards, a post's sanitised name that appears in a permalink structure is checked for duplication and a numeral i … | Jamie Talbot | 3.558 | 10 | 2005-04-12 | 2005-04-24 |
52. Preserve Code Formatting Preserve formatting of code for display by preventing its modification by WordPress and other plugins while also retaining whitespace. | Scott Reilly | 46.158 | 800 | 2005-04-14 | 2021-04-14 |
53. Obfuscate Email Obfuscate email addresses to deter email-harvesting spammers. | Scott Reilly | 95.575 | 9.000 | 2005-04-14 | 2021-04-14 |
54. Author Image(s) Display image (if present) and/or name for the author of a post, or for all authors on the blog. | Scott Reilly | 21.450 | 100 | 2005-04-14 | 2012-01-04 |
55. Draft Notifier Draft Notifier sends a notification email to your blog's admin address when a post written by a Contributor is Submitted for Review. | Michael D. Adams | 10.199 | 500 | 2005-04-23 | 2010-06-03 |
56. Cricket Moods Cricket Moods is a flexible "mood tag" WordPress plugin. It allows an author to add one or more "moods" to every post. | Keith "kccricket" Constable | 14.073 | 30 | 2005-05-02 | 2008-12-11 |
57. Paged Comments Paged Comments enables comment paging. Useful for those popular blog entries receiving many comments, or a simple guestbook page within WordPress. | Keyvan Minoukadeh | 22.255 | 100 | 2005-05-10 | 2008-12-24 |
58. wiki2xhtml transforms your writing from wiki to xhtml valid - adaptation of an extraordinary php class from dotclear.net | pierro | 884 | 0 | 2005-05-11 | 2005-05-11 |
59. Code Markup Code Markup is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. | Bennett McElwee | 20.491 | 300 | 2005-05-12 | 2008-04-14 |
60. Evermore Evermore automatically abbreviates all posts when they appear on a multiple-post page such as the main blog page. | Bennett McElwee | 93.371 | 1.000 | 2005-05-12 | 2018-10-23 |
61. Top Cat Top Cat allows you to specify a main category for your posts. Even though WordPress posts can have more than one category, you may want to specify whi … | Bennett McElwee | 2.395 | 10 | 2005-05-12 | 2005-05-27 |
62. Random Hadith WordPress 1.5 Plugin (Not tested on 1.2 – tester required) Displays Random Hadith on your website. Powered by http://www.kyantonius.com/hadith/ | Usayd Younis | 1.035 | 0 | 2005-05-21 | 2005-05-21 |
63. Kramer Kramer will add inbound links to a post on your weblog as pingbacks by checking Technorati and by monitoring incoming referrers. | Nik Cubrilovic and Mark Jaquith | 8.901 | 10 | 2005-05-28 | 2007-03-15 |
64. Just One Category On a category's archive page, displays only the posts directly in that category, not in any sub-categories. | Michael D Adams | 17.546 | 40 | 2005-06-01 | 2010-03-07 |
65. Google Adsense for Feeds This puts Google RSS Ads in your feed, make sure you fill in your publisher ID by editing the plugin file. | Matt Mullenweg | 20.776 | 70 | 2005-06-08 | 2008-01-05 |
66. Subscribe to Comments Subscribe to Comments allows commenters on an entry to subscribe to e-mail notifications for subsequent comments. | Mark Jaquith | 533.619 | 30.000 | 2005-06-09 | 2015-07-13 |
67. Subscribe2 – Form, Email Subscribers & Newsletters Sends a list of subscribers an email notification when you publish new posts. | weMail | 2.392.624 | 20.000 | 2005-06-16 | 2023-11-23 |
68. XML Sitemap Generator for Google Generate multiple types of sitemaps to improve SEO and get your website indexed quickly. | Auctollo | 39.244.615 | 1.000.000 | 2005-06-16 | 2024-04-10 |
69. Identify External Links Searches the text for links outside of the domain of the blog. To these, it adds class="extlink" (and optionally, target="_blank"). | Mark Jaquith | 9.360 | 50 | 2005-06-21 | 2006-01-30 |
70. Nice Categories Displays the categories conversationally, like: Category1, Category2 and Category3 | Mark Jaquith | 3.768 | 10 | 2005-06-21 | 2005-06-22 |
71. WordPress Version Check WordPress Version Check provides you with an easy way of checking that you are | Peter Westwood | 4.895 | 0 | 2005-06-28 | 2009-05-26 |
72. Database Backup for WordPress Database Backup for WordPress is your one-stop database backup solution for WordPress. | Delicious Brains | 3.689.921 | 100.000 | 2005-07-12 | 2022-05-26 |
73. Page Links To Lets you make a WordPress page (or port or other content type) link to a URL of your choosing (on your site, or on another site), instead of its norma … | Mark Jaquith | 4.501.983 | 200.000 | 2005-07-23 | 2024-03-26 |
74. Subpage Listing Allows you to display a list of the child pages of the currently viewed page. | Mark Jaquith | 26.246 | 300 | 2005-07-29 | 2012-05-16 |
75. GetRSS A quick RSS puller for Wordpress. Use <?php getRSS('http://example.com/feed/', '5', '<li>', '</li>');?> to fetch a feed. | Mahangu Weerasinghe | 3.667 | 10 | 2005-08-17 | 2005-08-17 |
76. Random Qur'anic Verse WordPress 1.5 Plugin (Not tested on 1.2 – tester required) // v 1.15, added Malay language support. Steps to install: Download the plug-in (ZIP) and extract. Open your Sidebar.php or any template file and a … | Usayd Younis | 1.361 | 10 | 2005-08-23 | 2005-08-24 |
77. Flashfader Put a flash slideshow on your wordpress site | Marcus Grellert | 26.690 | 200 | 2005-08-24 | 2010-11-22 |
78. Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce. | Automattic - Anti-spam Team | 319.680.287 | 5.000.000 | 2005-10-20 | 2024-03-21 |
79. |=== Usayd's HijriDate Plugin v1.87 ===| Adds the Hijri Date to your posts and an admin panel for configuration. | Usayd Younis | 1.771 | 10 | 2005-10-28 | 2005-10-28 |
80. Geo Mashup Include Google and OpenStreetMap maps in posts and pages, and map posts, pages, and other objects on global maps. Make WordPress into a GeoCMS. | Dylan Kuhn | 232.165 | 5.000 | 2005-11-15 | 2023-07-14 |
81. Memcached Object Cache Use memcached and the PECL memcache extension to provide a backing store for the WordPress object cache. | Ryan Boren, Denis de Bernardy, Matt Martz, Andy Skelton | 158.253 | 30 | 2005-12-19 | 2022-11-08 |
We trust this list has sparked the inspiration for you to contribute to the WordPress community in your own way. Whether it's assisting with translations or publishing your own plugin, every contribution counts toward the vibrant ecosystem of WordPress.
If you're eager to continue exploring, consider diving into articles on the Oldest WordPress Themes or the Most Popular WordPress Plugins.
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