There was a streak of news that came out of the WordPress theme viewer RSS feed today.

Just wanted to do a quick update for those wondering when you’ll be able to add new themes or update existing ones here in the directory. We’ve been working very hard on a new Subversion-backed database for themes that will allow you to upload themes as you did before, as a plain ZIP file, and we’re transparently check it into SVN so changes can be tracked just like we do for WordPress development.

There will also be moderation and review so that we can scan themes for XSS problems, malicious code, spam links, and other ways that people have been distributing malware themes. I’m sorry this has taken longer than I thought it would, but the problems involved with doing things “right” are non-trivial. Most importantly we want to ensure that once the re-launch is done you’ll have easy, fast, and stable access to the best and brightest in the theme world, and you’ll never have to think twice about the code you’re downloading.

According to Lorelle, the theme viewer has been offline for more than 5 months and theme authors are really starting to get upset. There are a ton of themes within the theme viewer that can be downloaded and used on new WordPress blogs today, but a lot of those themes are incompatible with 2.3. If you take into consideration that WordPress 2.4 is scheduled to be released in January, this may further compound problems.

Hopefully, they can get the work on the theme viewer finished before the release of 2.4 or at the very least, soon after. If WP 2.4 causes even more themes to be incompatible, we may be looking at a big mess that will take some time to clean up.