WordPress is easily one of the best blogging engines around. It’s got thousands of plugins, nearly as many themes, and its easy enough for anyone to use. But, for some time now, there hasn’t been any place to find all of the newest themes in one centralized location. That’s all about to change with the creation of the Theme Directory at wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Taking a page from the highly successful Plugin Directory, the Theme Directory lets you search and browse through themes with ease. There’s even a “Preview” button to view a live demo of the theme in action. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is there a lot of content at this point? Nope. But I’m sure it will start to grow quicker than anyone can possibly imagine in due time.

According to the WordPress development blog, it’s as easy for developers to include a theme in the directory as it is for users to download one.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

It’s about time the world’s most popular blogging platform finally has a place where everyone can go to check out great themes. Though, it may soak up some of the traffic that theme authors were used to getting on their own websites.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]