So just before I will unleash Autoptimize 2.3 on the world, the “active installations” ticker went from 400K to 500K;
What a nice gift from you all of you, thanks!
(the “Last updated: 19 hours ago” is due to an update of the tags in the readme.txt, 2.3 is not out yet)
active installs
More than 200000 active Autoptimize installs!
Today Autoptimize officially passed the threshold of 200000 active installs. w00t!!
Autoptimize 2.1 and first Power-Up released
Yesterday evening I released Autoptimize 2.1 and the first Power-Up to manage critical CSS has been made available as a optional service over at criticalcss.com. This short video explains some of the logic behind the Autoptimize Critical CSS Power-Up:
But let’s not forget about Autoptimize 2.1! The new features include:
- Autoptimize now appears in the admin-toolbar with an easy view on cache size and the possibility to purge the cache (thanks to Pablo Custo)
- A “More Optimization”-tab is shown with info about optimization tools- and services.
- settings-screen now accepts protocol-relative URL for CDN base URL
- admin GUI updated and responsiveness added
- If cache size becomes too big, a mail will be sent to the site admin
- power-users can enable Autoptimize to pre-gzip the autoptimized files with a filter
- new (smarter) defaults for JS and CSS optimization
Although excluding jQuery from autoptimization by default might seem counter-intuitive, the “smarter” defaults should allow more Autoptimize installs to work out-of-the-box (including on sites run by people who might not be inclined to troubleshoot/ reconfigure Autoptimize in the first place).
And thanks to the release I now have a better idea of the number of active installs (which wordpress.org lists as +100000); 2.1 was downloaded 3239 times yesterday evening and it is listed as running on 1.8% sites. Simple math learns that Autoptimize is currently active on approx. 180000 WordPress websites. Let’s aim for 200K by the end of 2016! 🙂
More goodness in wordpress.org plugin repo updates
Seems like the wordpress.org plugin pages, after recent improvements to the ratings-logic, now got an even more important update. They now use “active installations” as most important metric (as has been done on drupal.org module pages for years), with total number of downloads having been relegated to the stats page.
That stats page got a face-lift as well, featuring a graph of the active versions:
In case you’re wondering what the source of that “active installations” data is, I was too and reached out to plugin-master Otto (Samuel Wood, who replied;
[The source data comes from] plugin update checks. Every WP install asks for update checks every 12 hours or so. We store a count of that info.