The wordpress plugin directory hosts over 13 000 plugins right now. The number of plugins developed for wordpress have raised in the last year. In the same period of 2010 we could find only 7000 plugins in the wordpress official plugin directory. This means we are not counting plugins that for any reason are not present in the directory.

One of the reason that a lot of plugins are not in the directory is because their developers try to sell them. While it is not 100% legal to sell the plugins because of the GPL 2 licence on wordpress, they still do it and if asked they will say that they charge for the support for the plugin, not for the files itself. This means that if you find the plugin somewhere else you can use with legally and you don’t have to pay for it. You may receive an e-mail from the developer telling you that you copied the plugin and you don’t have the right to use it but don’t worry. While wordpress is gpl 2, anything build over it will have to be GPL too, which means it is free and anyone can modify and redistribute it for free with the condition he does not charge money for it.

We can’t know what is the real number of wordpress plugins developed including both official directory and other sources, but the number is impressive. Only the number of plugins in the official directory almost doubled in a year. This is good news and a sign that the wordpress community grows very fast.