Introducing WP Tally

The team you all know and love from Easy Digital Downloads is proud to present our latest creation… WP Tally!

WP Tally is the brainchild of Pippin Williamson, and was developed by the Easy Digital Downloads Team… but what is it? It’s the result of a discussion we had regarding the inability to readily track cumulative download counts for WordPress plugin developers. It’s also remarkably simple to use!

Upon visiting WP Tally, you are greeted with a simple search box. Enter your WordPress.org username and hit search and the magic begins! We go fetch the details on your plugins from the WordPress plugins API, parse it into an easily readable (and, in our opinion, pleasant) format, and provide you with a clean list of all your plugins, some basic meta data, and a cumulative download count.

But we didn’t settle for just a simple website… we took it a step farther and built a public API for all the intrepid developers out there who might want an easy-to-use source for their own plugin data and download stats! How easy you ask? The following is an example of how to access the WP Tally API…

$args = array(
    'timeout' => 5
);

$wptally = wp_remote_get( 'http://wptally.com/api/mordauk', $args );
$data = wp_remote_retrieve_body( &$wptally );

By default, this will return a JSON object containing an array of the users plugins, and relevant data as well as an info array containing the total download count and number of plugins. However, we recognize that some users may prefer working with XML, so the data can be returned in XML format by adding &format=xml to the query string!

We think the API is fairly straightforward, but just for the sake of completeness, the following is a sample (truncated) API return.

{
    "plugins": {
        "easy-digital-downloads": {
            "name": "Easy Digital Downloads",
            "url": "http:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/easy-digital-downloads",
            "version": "2.1.5",
            "added": "10 Apr, 2012",
            "updated": "09 Oct, 2014",
            "rating": 4.8,
            "downloads": 403967
        },
        "restrict-content-pro-csv-user-import": {
            "name": "Restrict Content Pro - CSV User Import",
            "url": "http:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/restrict-content-pro-csv-user-import",
            "version": "1.1.1",
            "added": "03 Sep, 2012",
            "updated": "02 Oct, 2014",
            "rating": 5,
            "downloads": 1702
        },
        "restrict-content-pro-bbpress": {
            "name": "Restrict Content Pro - bbPress",
            "url": "http:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/restrict-content-pro-bbpress",
            "version": "0.5",
            "added": "05 Jul, 2012",
            "updated": "25 Sep, 2014",
            "rating": 4.8,
            "downloads": 1908
        },
        ...
    },
    "info": {
        "user": "mordauk",
        "profile": "https:\/\/profiles.wordpress.org\/mordauk",
        "count": 57,
        "total_downloads": 1293643
    }
}

So what do you think? Do you have a use for a tool like WP Tally? Got a suggestion for how we can make the site, our service, or the API better? Maybe a suggestion for a new product or service? Let us know!