The Offi­cial Word­Press Theme Direc­tory sucks. Sorry guys, I am sure you spent quite a time on it. And I am very gra­te­ful that every sub­mit­ted theme is scree­ned against...

The Offi­cial Word­Press Theme Direc­tory sucks. Sorry guys, I am sure you spent quite a time on it. And I am very gra­te­ful that every sub­mit­ted theme is scree­ned against mali­cious code. And yes, I know about the tag-filter. But it is just not enough. Not any­more. The direc­tory needs more, much more. With lite­rally thou­sands of themes and more coming every days, the present sys­tem does not help pro­mo­ting newest fea­tures. Most the­mers won’t even know a given fea­ture exist, because it is not adver­ti­sed pro­perly (by inclu­ding a fil­ter check­box on the theme direc­tory). And power users get frus­tra­ted. Two examples:

• Twen­ty­Ten theme has a cool fea­ture that the text edi­tor mimics the sty­ling of the public page. I would like to see more theme with this, but I can’t, because I don’t know the name of the fea­ture and there is no tag fil­te­ring for this.
• Drop­box CDN plu­gin makes your blog load fas­ter but requires a stylesheet_directory entry in headers.php for the theme in use. Heck, even Twen­ty­Ten doesn’t have this!
• A lot of plu­gin are just rein­ven­ting the wheel. Sure, choice is good, but too much choice (par­ti­cu­larly without expla­na­tion) is not good. Dru­pal has a wor­king pro­ject on this and Ubuntu sort of fixed this straight from the beginning.

I think the whole theme direc­tory should be rebuilt with auto­ma­tic tes­tings. Such a thing is already being done for scree­ning sub­mit­ted themes against mali­cious code (you can do the same for a theme down­loa­ded somew­here else with the ). It “just” has to be done the same for these other fea­ture. Plus, that would ins­pire the­mers to do more than just a new skin with some widgets.