WPMU – Using WordPress Themes

I’m exploring what changes are required so that WPMU can use WordPress themes. Currently, WPMU uses Smarty templates but there’s an order of magnitude more WordPress themes out there so it’d be great if we could use those too. The WP theme engine has become a very flexible and sophisticated templating engine over the past year. Version 1.6 of WordPress will have easy tags, so template authors don’t even have to know PHP to create their templates!
In brief, WPMU can use WordPress themes with little modification, although only read-only. If you want to edit the theme then the theme files have to copied into seperate blog theme folders. The pieces are falling into place and hopefully I can make it an option so that Smarty and WP themes can be mixed on the one host!