The official WordPress.org theme directory is a project that has been a long time coming. Finally, over the weekend, it was launched but it seems like it might not be totally ready for primetime just yet.

There have only been 9 themes added since the directory opened several days ago. Fortunately for those nine themes, the lack of selection means they’ve been downloaded a combined 15,000 times at the time of this post. Anyone who can somehow manage to get their theme up on this directory right now is going to get some pretty incredible exposure.

Hopefully the rate of submissions and approvals ramps up soon so that the WordPress community finally has a trustworthy resource for free themes.

The world of WordPress themes is a dark place, my friends. I’ve written before about the dangers of using free WordPress themes but things are only getting worse for this topic.

Recently, many sites are popping up offering free WordPress themes for download. That should be no surprise as there are already many similar sites on the web today. The twist with this new breed is that they’re posting freely available themes from other sites and then stripping out or adding in spam links to each theme.

Of course, they are being paid for those links while the original theme designer receives nothing and also has his creation modified against his will. A lot of these sites are being found and reported to designers in the WordPress community each day.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is a whole lot that can be done to stop them. If one happens to be shut down it would be pretty trivial for another one to spring up and take its place in short order.

Just remember to be careful about what themes you’re downloading and from where.

With all of the downtime issues the popular service Twitter has been suffering from in recent months it might be time to look again at Prologue.

For those of you who may not remember, Prologue is a free theme the folks over at Automattic released back in January of this year. It is, essentially, a simple self hosted Twitter clone using WordPress as the back-end and a highly customized theme for the front-end.

Any companies using Twitter as a means of social instant messaging might want to look into using Prologue instead. Twitter has been experiencing such awful server issues that it is no longer a reliable service at all.

I had asked about a month ago where the ecommerce solutions for WordPress were.

Tonight while I was browsing around I came across Ecommerce Themes by the fine folks at iThemes. There’s a cool video explaining the features of the theme.

This theme falls under the category of “premium” which means it costs a nominal fee to use (in this case, that means $49). For someone looking to launch an online store selling their own products or other people’s products through affiliate links this theme might be the solution for you.

I’d like to see someone release something similar for free to help broaden this market a bit. Or, maybe, have iThemes lower the developer license cost to get more web developers out there using their theme.

There are a lot of great WordPress themes available online that you can download and use for free. A free WordPress theme is an excellent solution for anyone looking to start a new blog on a small budget.

Of course, as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Anyone considering using a free WordPress theme needs to be aware of the dangers involved in using one on their blog.

There is an entire industry of WordPress theme designers who build designs, sell links in the theme’s footer and then release the theme for free online. After these sponsored links are sold they are embedded into the theme’s code in a way that makes them almost impossible to remove without some programming knowledge. An inexperienced user who tries to remove the links almost inevitably breaks the layout of the theme in the process.

The motivation for the theme designer is to make money (and there’s nothing wrong with making money) and the link buyers are looking for ways to raise their relevancy in search engines by getting more links to their sites out there. So what’s the problem? Everyone wins, right? You get a free theme, the designer gets paid and the buyers help their search engine rankings.

The problem is that using a free theme with sponsored links opens yourself up to having your blog tied with sites that search engines consider bad or spam. It’s guilt by association with the paid links in the theme you’re using. This then imposes a penalty on your own site whether or not your blog’s topic is related to the sponsored links.

If you’re looking to use a free WordPress theme on your blog remember to do your due diligence and make sure if the theme contains any links that look questionable. If you’re uncomfortable with the links then your best bet is to pick another free theme to use instead.