Top Plugin downloads for the last 12 months (2012)

Moodle.org recently added stats reports for plugins – an example of which is the Questionnaire Module Stats Page. It certainly has shown up some interesting information.

As you can see, it includes the following graphs:

• Downloads by month in the last year
• Total downloads by version
• Version downloads by month in the last year

This is really very cool, well done Moodle HQ!

In addition to the “per plugin” stats page, there is an overview page which saves me having to do much data scraping to get some interesting info!

This graph shows the Top 20 of Plugin downloads (by total download) in the last year taken from the stats page:

Click to view in fullsize

Now one interesting point from this is that of the top 20

• 10 are Themes
• 5 are Activities
• 2 are Course Formats
• 2 are  Blocks
• 1 is an Assignment 2.2 plugin

A few things pulled out:

• The top integration with a virtual conference / classroom system is BigBlueButton ( reviewed here)
• The top Activity is  Questionnaire ( reviewed here)
• The top Course Format is Collapsed Topics (review here)
• The top theme is Aardvark (which featured in my theme whitepaper)
• The top block is Configurable Reports (reviewed here)

These are very interesting stats, and it is great that they are public (not sure how long they have been around, but I only recently spotted them).

However, these are 12 month reports, so they also added in a report for the last 2 months. Although most feature the order is changed and some other items now are included (probably due to not being in the new system for the 12 months at a guess).

Click to view in fullsize

So from this info:

• 8 Themes
• 6 Activities
• 3 blocks
• 3 Course Formats

And the top items from this 2 month list are:

• Activity : Hotpot
• Theme: Aardvark (which featured in my theme whitepaper)
• Course Format: Collapsed Topics (review here)
• Block: Configurable Reports (reviewed here)

So Hotpot has squeezed its way in above Questionnaire by an extra 98! downloads in the last 2 months.

Thoughts

This is a very welcome addition to the plugins database, and will provide valuable extra information to admins and users of Moodle as to what are the most popular plugins and perhaps which they should think about evaluating.