Well this is certainly big big news for the WordPress theme community!
Automattic announced earlier today that it is to start offering commercial WordPress themes to wordpress.com users. The story has been picked up amongst all the big tech blogs.
Matt has also posted the back story to the new commercial Marketplace over on themeshaper.
We had suspected early in January that Automattic would be making a big splash in 2011 in the theme community over on the wpcandy.com Future of WordPress themes post and Matt has hinted before that something like this would arrive some day and now it’s here.
For the moment it looks like this is very much a live experiment and I’m sure it won’t …

Ok folks, some great news this week for wordpress fans everywhere. Ian Stewart of themeshaper fame has joined Automattic – the good people who lead the wordpress project.
This is big big news for the wordpress theme community. Ian has been a leader in the community for quite some time and is responsible for the development of thematic, one of the best wordpress theme frameworks around. (Slight segway: learn more about theme frameworks.)
Having played around extensively with thematic, I can safely say Ian is a very talented guy who is undoubtedly going to be a massive contributor to the core wordpress project going forward.
The other excellent piece of news that comes with this announcement is that …