WordPress is a great system because it is extendible by using plugins. However, the search function within WordPress and their website is very annoying, since you can’t order your search results by plugin rating or most installed, so even if you get a list of similar plugins, the best one might be buried deep in the following search result pages.
Well, I decided to build my own! You can find it here (note it is over 9mb so it will take a while to load and might look like your browser has crashed, just give it time. There are over 40,000 plugins!):
http://wp-pluginsearch.andypi.co.uk/
Basically I used python and the beautiful soup library to scrape the wordpress website for the information (title, tags, ratings, active installs etc), for each plugin, and outputted it as an html table (see my python code on github here). I took hours to run, I should have probably used a scrapy instead of requests to download each plugin’s webpage synchronously. I thought the search and sort part was going to be the hardest bit, but actually I found the javascript datatables.js script which makes any html table searchable with multi column searching (shift-click to add columns to sort). All you need to do to make it work is to add the scripts links to jQuery and datatables to your html file’s head tag, and run the datatables plugin on your (named by html tag id) table:
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf8" src="https://cdn.datatables.net/1.10.13/js/jquery.dataTables.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready( function () {
$('#table_id').DataTable();
} );
</script>
Very easy!
