Today we launched the WordPress Showcase, a display of some of the best and brightest WordPress users, who are using it to do a whole lot more than blog.

Pick your flavor and check out the possibilities available through WordPress MU, WordPress.com, WordPress.com VIP and WordPress.org.

Site screenshots are constantly updated, so what you see is a realtime look at what’s going on with our hottest users.

Don’t see something there that should be? Suggest an addition! We’ll check it out and add it to the bunch if we think it makes the cut.

It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Bringing the new theme directory under the WordPress “extend” umbrella allowed us to take advantage of all the infrastructure that has already been built up to support WordPress.org. If you’ve browsed through the plugin directory, you’ll feel right at home in the new theme directory.

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.

That catches you up to where we’re at today. When you finish that theme you’ve been slaving over, upload it to the new directory and let us know what you think. Since so much has changed since the old theme directory we’re starting fresh from zero. If you’ve got specific questions or suggestions contact us and we’ll do our best to get them answered.

If you follow WordPress development closely you’ve probably noticed a few new faces around lately, or to be more accurate a few old faces who are taking on bigger roles in the community. I would like to take this opportunity to announce and publicly congratulate Mark Jaquith and Peter Westwood who have both become lead developers, the highest development honor on WordPress.org.

Mark Jaquith has been using and contributing to WordPress since 2004. Mark especially enjoys watching people use WordPress to express themselves in areas of the world where free expression is suppressed. But, being a voracious consumer of information, he probably reads your cat blog too.

Peter works as an Embedded Software Engineer developing a web-enabled BMS controller. Using WordPress since version 1.0.1, Peter spends his spare time triaging bugs on Trac and investigating new open source tools. When not at the computer Peter can often be found photographing flowers, animals and cars and listening to a wide variety of music.

In just a few short days WordPress 2.3 will be coming out with tons of new features that (hopefully) will make you want to upgrade right away. Well while you have a bit of time over this lovely weekend, here are some things you can do to help yourself prepare for the big upgrade on Monday:

• Back up your blog. It never goes out of style, and we have a nifty Codex page with a few different methods.
• Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread.) Upgrading might get you cool new features anyway. Don’t forget about our plugin directory.
• Enjoy the last time you have to check for plugin updates manually, as 2.3 will do it magically behind the scenes.
• Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
• Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.
• Make a list of your friends who are less computer literate so you can help them upgrade. (Maybe throw an upgrade party?)

If you have any other ideas put them on your blog and pingback this post.