Similarly, I think a large percent of the audience didn’t really grasp the size of the GPL theme announcement either. To clarify that, there will NOT be a paid themes sections. Matt said that he doesn’t see WordPress.org ever charging for themes or plugins. What he said was that themes that were FREE to get and use but offered paid support would get a special place so that those that wanted that option could find them.

There was one other announcement that I thought was really big, which was that they are going to try to get a “canonical plugin” system set up to get resources behind the leading plugins. This means that they’d try to pick the role management plugin that is currently the “standard” (popular , current, and stable) and mark it as such so that others in the community could get behind it and support it rather than make their own. I’m hoping this will help to get some more plugins internationalized and localized, as well as tidied up and streamlined.