By Justin Tadlock on September 12, 2011
Yes, you read that right. Hybrid Core has been updated to version 1.2 and includes all new goodies for you theme developers. There’s even a few user-friendly changes in this version.
If you’re a theme developer currently using Hybrid Core, it’s time to update your themes. If you’re a user of one of the themes from here, theme updates are coming soon so that you too can take advantage of the new features.
New user features
The most prominent user feature is the separation of post meta boxes. In the past, all post meta was shown in the “Post Settings” box. This was a bit of a mess to be honest. The new version creates a meta box for each feature:
- SEO: Title and meta fields.
- Layout: Selector for choosing a single post layout.
- Template: Selector for choosing a post template if theme has any.
- Stylesheet: Input box for entering a custom stylesheet.
- Series: Input box for a series name.
Thumbnail: Removed since the “Featured Image” is now a WordPress standard.
Okay, so that’s really it for user features. This is a development framework, so the real goodies are for developers.
New developer features
As always, I work almost every day improving the code base for the framework. The code is continuously getting better as I come up with new ideas and I get feedback from you all. There were over 100 code commits to this release, most of which were minor enhancements and fixes.
- New “Cleaner Caption” extension. This new extension allows you to better design for captions that don’t look like the standard box-like captions in most WordPress themes.
- Meta box separation. You no longer have to declare support for
hybrid-core-post-meta-box. If your theme supports a feature, its post meta box will appear as appropriate.
- Changes to how the default theme settings meta boxes are added. More on this in the forums.
- Dropped support of PHP4.
- Only supports WordPress 3.2+
- Child theme translation loader. The framework will auto-detect both parent and child theme translation files and load them.
- Code improvements to all existing features.
- Better support for custom post types and taxonomies within existing features.
- Even more modular. Almost no code is loaded or run unless your theme specifically supports it.
These features won’t get too many folks excited unless they really dig quality code. I’m excited about these changes because they set up a foundation for some extremely cool ideas I have for version 1.3, such as bbPress support.
There are loads more improvements though, which aren’t really worth noting in a release post but help make version 1.2 leaps and bounds better than the previous version.
Download Hybrid Core 1.2
You can download the latest version from the main Hybrid Core page.
If you need help working with some of the changes or just want to ask more in-depth questions about the improvements, stop by the support forums. I hope you all enjoy this new release and that your users like the improvements to your themes.
Posted in Development
By Justin Tadlock on June 22, 2011
Trending is the latest theme I’ve had baking in the Theme Hybrid oven for the past few months. As with the previous theme, Retro-fitted, I wanted to step a little bit outside of my design comfort zone again and just have some fun with theme design.
I had some doubts about releasing it because there was a feature that I could never quite get right for version 0.1. So, I canned the feature and decided to stop making everyone wait for the initial release of this theme.
A new parent theme
As with the past few themes, I wanted to reiterate that this is not a child theme.
Trending is a complete parent theme built off the Hybrid Core framework. What this means is that it has the benefit of several years of development behind it while being fresh and using the latest WordPress coding standards and features.
If you want to make modifications, you should make your changes within a child theme. At the end of this post, you can download the sample child theme I’ve put together. It will have everything you need to get started making changes.
Theme features
The Trending theme has a number of awesome features that you’ll probably like:
- Cool sticky post design with a custom image size.
- Multiple nav menus.
- Per-post/page layouts (one-column, two-column, and three-column layouts).
- Art direction (the ability to add custom, per-post stylesheets).
- Custom widgets (overwrites the default WordPress widgets with better alternatives).
- Several sidebars (you can add widgets in several places).
- Built-in pagination (no need for a plugin to handle page numbers).
- Breadcrumbs, thumbnails, and much more!
It’s not limited to these features though. There’s plenty to play around with.
Download the theme
This theme has been tested and works with the latest version of WordPress. It is a parent theme, so any modifications you make should be handled within a child theme (download example below).
As always, please ask any support questions in the support forums. I hope you enjoy this new parent theme. Please take a moment and give it a good rating if you like it.
Posted in WordPress Themes | Tagged WordPress Themes
By Justin Tadlock on April 18, 2011
Retro-fitted is the latest free theme offering here at Theme Hybrid. It was originally an old theme I had created for my personal site that I wanted to take out of retirement. I only had a small screenshot of the old theme left, so I recreated the entire theme from scratch, adding about three years worth of design experience to the mix.
This is probably one of my favorite themes that I’ve ever designed because it allowed me to love design again. I’ve spent much of the past few years focused mostly on PHP code and development, so it was nice to wipe the dust from my copy of Photoshop and just have a little fun with colors and step outside my design comfort zone.
A new parent theme
Many of you are aware that new themes here will be parent themes rather than child themes of a single parent. I just wanted to reiterate that this is not a child theme of another theme from this site.
Retro-fitted is a full-fledged parent theme built off the Hybrid Core framework. What this means is that it has the benefit of several years of development behind it while being fresh and using the latest WordPress coding standards and features.
If you want to make modifications, you’ll want to do so via a child theme. At the end of this post, you can download a sample child theme. It’ll have everything you need to get started.
Some features of the theme
Retro-fitted is the perfect theme for bloggers looking to spruce up their site this spring. It has a number of extra features that you might enjoy:
- Per-post/page layouts (one-column, two-column, and three-column layouts).
- Art direction (the ability to add custom, per-post stylesheets).
- Custom widgets (overwrites the default WordPress widgets with better alternatives).
- Several sidebars (you can add widgets in many places).
- Built-in pagination (no need for a plugin to handle page numbers).
- Breadcrumbs, thumbnails, and much more!
Download the theme
This theme has been tested and works with the latest version of WordPress. It is a parent theme, so any modifications you make should be handled within a child theme (download example below).
As usual, please ask any support questions in the support forums. I hope you enjoy this new theme. Please give it a good rating if you like it.
Posted in WordPress Themes | Tagged Retro-fitted, WordPress Themes
By Justin Tadlock on March 7, 2011
I know it’s been a long wait between Hybrid version 0.8 and 0.9, but a lot of work has been done behind the scenes in this time. I had originally planned to launch 0.9 in December, alongside WordPress 3.1. Therefore, I built 0.9 entirely on 3.1, so there’s no backwards compatibility with WordPress 3.0.
Obviously, WordPress took a little longer to update. So, I was stuck with a nearly finished update to the theme that no one could use. The good news: I built two new themes in that time that I’ll be releasing soon.
But, let’s get down to business. You want to know about version 0.9 of the Hybrid theme, right?
Continue reading “Hybrid theme version 0.9″
Posted in WordPress Themes | Tagged Hybrid Theme
By Justin Tadlock on December 10, 2010
This is just a quick post to let you all know that Hybrid Core has been updated to version 1.0.1. So, if you’re building custom parent themes or doing client themes based off Hybrid Core, it’s time to upgrade.
You can update via Subversion or download a zip of the latest release from the Hybrid Core page. Very few things have changed, so this should be the easiest update you’ve ever done.
Bug fixes included in 1.0.1
There were really only two bugs that needed to be addressed.
- Translation files were not being loaded from the theme’s
languages folder nor were they recognizing the themename- prefix. This was actually only one bug but caused two problems.
- Having an empty array of theme settings caused an infinite redirect loop when accessing the theme settings page.
Thanks to everyone that helped spot these issues and for helping me figure out how to fix them. Hope you enjoy the update.
Posted in Development | Tagged Hybrid Core
By Justin Tadlock on October 25, 2010
Just a few days ago, the Hybrid Core theme framework was released for use by the public. I wanted to release a new theme quickly after releasing the framework to serve as a great example of how to use the framework’s features. Thus, the Prototype theme was born.
Prototype is a new parent theme that takes advantage of nearly all of the Hybrid Core framework features. It comes packaged with multiple nav menus, several widget areas, and per-post layouts, allowing anyone from designers to users to quickly creates beautiful sites.
A parent theme? Not a child theme?
That’s right. This thing isn’t a child theme of one of the other available themes on the site. It’s a full-blown parent theme itself.
This is a new direction you’ll see from Theme Hybrid. Rather than releasing many complex child themes that are impossible to update, new themes will be parent themes. What this means is that you can make modifications to the themes with your own child theme. The goal has always been upgradibility, and that’s what I’d like to aim for with all themes.
Does this mean there’ll be no more child themes? No, there’ll still be child theme releases that are used in a way that child themes were intended to be used. You just won’t see things like me trying to make a news or portfolio child theme based on a blog parent theme. I’ll get into more details on this in a later post.
What are the features of Prototype?
Prototype is a blogging theme with plenty of cool features for the average blogger. I wanted to keep it extremely simple to use.
- Per-post/page layouts (one-column, two-column, and three-column layouts).
- Art direction (the ability to upload custom, per-post stylesheets).
- Three nav menus (before header, after header, and footer).
- Several sidebars (you can add widgets all over the place).
- Custom background (uses the WordPress feature for this).
- Built-in pagination (no need for a plugin to handle page numbers).
- Breadcrumbs, thumbnails, and much more!
Download the theme
This theme is completely free and open source. It’s licensed under the GPL version 2 (license in the download).
As usual, please ask any support questions in the support forums. I hope you enjoy this new theme. Please give it a good rating if you like it.
Posted in WordPress Themes | Tagged Prototype Theme, WordPress Themes
