Description

A lot of people write plugins and even more people have a hard time finding good plugins. If you write plugins I’m sure you are always being asked for recommendations.
This simple plugin allows you to show off the plugins you have favorited on your WordPress.org plugin author profile in a sidebar widget.

Your users and site visitors will know what plugins you like. You can also display the plugins star rating along with the author with link to the author uri.

The styling is minimal and easily adapts to your theme design with few hooks added for extension if needed.

Now includes option to shuffle results. Only want to show 4 of your favorites but you have more? Just choose the shuffle option and the results will be randomized on each page load (Does not decrease performance).

How does it work?

Just in time for WordPress 3.5 a new addition was made to the WordPress.org plugins api. The api allows you to fetch your favorites as an object. The plugin stores the resulting object as a transient so your not hammering the api on every page load.
Any of the object vars can be added to the output of the widget using the c3m_favorite_results filter.

This is the same api used in the new favorites tab in the dashboard for 3.5.

How to filter the output

To add additonal CSS:

function my_star_css( $css ) {
    $css =. '.c3m-favorites li {
             padding: 10px 4px 0;
             background: pink;
             color: purple;
            }';
    return $css;
}

You can also remove it entirely by passing __return_false to the filter: