A while back, @otto42 started to work on bringing the Theme Directory over to WordPress (I know that sounds weird, but currently it runs on an old version of bbpress). The idea is to split functionality and appearance, making the Repopackage custom post type and the uploader a plugin, and let a theme handle the display of themes.
With the help of Matias Ventura, I continued Otto’s work on the theme part of things, taking the existing theme install experience from the admin and making it work on the front-end of the theme. I’m currently in the process of adding server output, so the repository stays crawl-able for search engines. Steps to take going forward include determining what features to take over from the existing theme repository (as the theme install UI is a lot simpler), adding these things to the API, and figuring out how single theme views should look like vs. detail views on index.
I haven’t committed any improvements to meta.trac so far as they are dependent on #30116, but the plan is to make that process a little bit more public. Once the core improvements are in, I’ll make sure to push my updates. Everything will be trac’ed in #745-meta so you can follow along there.
Yesterday @coffee2code and I chatted about how we can work together on the project as well. He’ll look at the difference between the current theme repository and the in-dash experience, to determine what to keep and what to drop. Scott might also be able to pitch in on the plugin side at a later point in time, where we still need to make the theme uploader work.
We’d like to have the new experience ready to go before the end of the year. For that to happen we might decide to take a more iterative approach, go with what the in-dash experience has to offer right now, and do a v2 where we port back features from the existing theme repository. This part has not been determined so far.