A lightweight Chrome extension that adds a rating trend chart (last 12 months) to WordPress.org plugin pages.
It visualizes how plugin ratings evolve over time — something WordPress.org itself does not show.
- 📈 Rating trend chart for the last 12 months
- ⭐ Monthly average (1–5 stars)
- 🚫 No gaps: missing months are interpolated
- 🕒 Stops early once enough data is collected
- ⚡ Performance-optimized:
- 🎯 Partial HTML parsing (reviews only)
- 💾 Local cache (7 days)
- 🌍 i18n support
- 🧠 Smart fallback on localized WordPress sites
- ❌ No output if reviews are outdated
- ✅
wordpress.org/plugins/... - ❌ Localized sites (e.g.
de.wordpress.org)
→ shows a fallback message with a link to wordpress.org
- Clone or download this repository
- Open Chrome and go to
chrome://extensions - Enable Developer mode
- Click Load unpacked
- Select this project folder
Done 🎉
The chart will appear on WordPress.org plugin pages below the rating stars.
- Scrapes review pages from
wordpress.org/support/plugin/{slug}/reviews/ - Fetches only what’s needed (reviews list)
- Builds a monthly average series
- Renders a lightweight SVG chart
- Stops fetching once 12 distinct months are found
No external APIs. No tracking. No data leaves your browser.
Two main reasons:
-
Performance
WordPress.org does not provide an API for rating history.
The extension has to scrape review pages from HTML, which can become slow for older plugins with many reviews. -
Relevance
Ratings from several years ago often say little about the current state of a plugin.
The last 12 months usually provide a more realistic picture.
In short: faster, more relevant, more useful.
There are two different reasons why no chart may be displayed:
1. Too few recent ratings
If a plugin has received only a very small number of ratings in the last 12 months,
the chart is replaced by a short message (“Not enough ratings to show a trend”).
2. No recent ratings at all
If a plugin has not received any new ratings in over 12 months,
no chart is shown at all.
Why?
A “trend” without recent data would be misleading.
In this case, showing nothing is better than showing a bad chart.
Some months simply have no reviews — that’s normal.
In those cases:
- the value is estimated based on the surrounding months
- the chart shows this section as a dashed line
Why dashed?
👉 Because these values are not real data points, but calculated ones.
This keeps the chart readable without pretending false precision.
On localized sites like:
de.wordpress.orgfr.wordpress.org
the extension cannot fetch reviews due to browser security restrictions (CORS).
What happens instead?
- No chart is shown
- A short message appears with a link to the English page on
wordpress.org - The chart works normally there
The extension does not load full pages.
Instead, it:
- fetches only the review listings
- parses only the HTML parts it actually needs
- ignores everything else
Result:
- less data transferred
- faster loading
- lower server load
As soon as data for 12 distinct months is available:
- no further pages are fetched
- even if more review pages exist
This avoids unnecessary requests and keeps things fast.
If a plugin has received fewer than 5 ratings in the last 12 months,
there simply isn’t enough data to identify a meaningful trend.
In this case, the chart is replaced with this message instead of showing a misleading or noisy visualization.
This extension scrapes publicly available data from WordPress.org.
It is intended for personal use and analysis.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by WordPress.org.
MIT