Over in a comment thread on the Tavern, Adam mentioned that he’d like to have a plugin count in the Right Now box on the Dashboard. As it happens, I once wrote a plugin for a client that added some information to the Right Now box, so it was easy to alter it to print the number of plugins:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: How Many Plugins
Plugin URI: http://stephanieleary.com/
Description: Counts the number of active plugins you have and prints a link in the Right Now box
Author: Stephanie Leary
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://stephanieleary.com/
*/
function scl_get_plugin_count() {
$all_plugins = apply_filters( 'all_plugins', get_plugins() );
foreach ( (array) $all_plugins as $plugin_file => $plugin_data) {
if ( is_plugin_active($plugin_file) ) {
$active_plugins[ $plugin_file ] = $plugin_data;
}
}
$total_active_plugins = count($active_plugins);
echo '<p class="plugins-right-now">You have <a href="plugins.php">'.$total_active_plugins.' active plugins</a>.';
}
add_action('activity_box_end', 'scl_get_plugin_count');
?>
Save this as a PHP file in your wp-content/plugins directory (I just called it count-plugins.php) and activate it.
Of course, if you have a lot of plugins, I suppose this might slow down your Dashboard a little.
ETA: There’s a much shorter solution in the comments!
You’re looping over lots of useless data here. You just need to echo count( get_option( ‘active_plugins’ ) )
Well, I thought so too at first, but why on earth doesn’t plugins.php do it that way?
Because plugins.php has to retrieve a number of info for each plugins: title, urls, version, is it active, etc…
Ah yes, this is much shorter if all you need is the count!
I was coming here to suggest the same thing as Ozh. get_plugins() reads the entire directory of plugins, verifies files and plugin headers, and the like. It’s slow, and you probably don’t want to slow your dashboard down that much. Calling get_option(‘active_plugins’) is a cheap and easy way for the same result.
In addition to what @Ohz said, if you want to make it WP network friendly
$count = count( get_option( ‘active_plugins’ ) );
if( is_multisite() )
$count += count( get_site_option( ‘active_sitewide_plugins’, array() ) );
echo $count;
Cool. Thanks, Ron!