Release a blog theme keeping these things in mind

Formatting

Have you styled every element from the visual editor in WordPress admin to display properly? This includes block quotes, tables, and both ordered and unordered lists.
Do block quotes, lists, and so on work within the comments?
Are you styling comments and trackbacks differently? And do you highlight author comments?
Have you put in special styling for sticky posts? Is special styling needed?
Make sure headings 1 to 6 look good, even if you think that fewer is more than enough (which it is).
Do images inserted from within WordPress display properly? This includes images floating to the leftand right as well as centered images.
Do image captions work?
What happens if an image that is too wide gets published? Does it break the design?

Naturally, there is a ton of things that are directly related to your theme that you need to test out as well. Things like working menu links and readability will have to be put to the test too. The previous checklists are to help you avoid common WordPress-related mistakes with your theme. Add to the checklists anything that is related to your design and code, and you’ll find they’ll grow even more.

Commercial Themes and the GPL License

Commercial GPL themes, or premium themes as they are also called, cannot be submitted to wordpress.org at this time. However, if you’re a theme reseller you can get featured on the commercial themes page, which currently is just a links page containing screenshots of some popular themes, but no hosting. In other words, that means that the commercial GPL’d theme you’re selling won’t work with automatic updates from within the WordPress admin interface, since wordpress.org won’t let you host it there unless you let it be free for all to download.

Naturally, if you do that hosting may be approved, and you can make money on providing support or customizations to the design, or whatever your theme business is all about.

This is a new addition to wordpress.org, and the debate on how commercial GPL themes should be managed, is more or less raging all the time. That’s why you should probably take a look at what the situation is right now and, if you intend to profit from commercial GPL themes in any way, you should keep up-to-date. Read more at wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/.

Submitting to wordpress.org

If the theme checklist wasn’t an obstacle, and your theme is licensed under a GPL compatible license, you can submit it to the wordpress.org theme directory. This is good for several reasons, the most prominent being the ability to reach WordPress users through the official channel, which incidentally now also resides within the admin interface. It also brings version control and hosting, as well as nice linkage with the wordpress.org support forums.

Your theme needs to be complete and saved in a single zip file. This should contain all the theme’s template files, where style.css is extremely important. This is where the version is listed, along with the tags that are used to sort your theme.

You also need to include a screenshot.png file, which has to be a screenshot of your theme in action, not a logo or similar. Other rules include Gravatar.com and widget support, exposed RSS feeds, showing the weblog title and tagline, as well as listing both categories and tags by default.

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