Hybrid Core 6.0 Now Live, ThemeHybrid.com Community Relaunch

Today, I am happy to announce version 6.0 of the Hybrid Core development framework. It has been a long time coming, and I am excited to see what members of our community build with it. If you bear with me for a bit, I also have a few extra announcements.

Before getting into the details, I just want to give a special shoutout to Syed Abrar Ahmed Shah (follow him via GitHub, Twitter, Website). Without the work he put into this release, I probably would not be announcing 6.0 today.

It is hard to believe that it’s been nearly three years since we’ve had a major release of Hybrid Core. Version 5.x really stood up well in that time, and version 6.0 does not veer far from the same foundation. The primary difference between the two is how the code is packaged.

HC 6.0 is part of a years-long plan to split each component of the framework into individual repositories. This change is so that developers can simply bundle only the code they need in their projects instead of a lot of stuff they don’t.

However, there are other benefits. A lot of folks talk about writing code that is future-proof, and this is something we have always strived to do in this community. But, it can be equally as important to write code that is easy to remove. The web changes, and it becomes easy to create legacy baggage supporting code for obscure and outdated use cases in a massive framework. By splitting the code, it never ties down the primary framework with code we no longer need as WordPress changes.

Another benefit is that HC is no longer tied to theme development. Plugin authors can use it and the various, non-theme packages too.

The New Packages

All code is now hosted on the Theme Hybrid GitHub organization. It is no longer tied to my personal account. My hope is that this change means that the projects we create here will outlive me if, for some reason, I am not around in the future.

HC is now split into the following new repositories:

• Hybrid Core – Service container and application foundation.
• Hybrid Attr – Custom HTML attributes creator.
• Hybrid Contracts – Helper interfaces for common functionality.
• Hybrid Lang – Language package when using hybrid-core text strings.
• Hybrid Media Grabber – Featured post media for video and audio.
• Hybrid Media Meta – Grabs and formats attached media metadata.
• Hybrid Pagination – Standard pagination for posts, archives, and comments.
• Hybrid Template – Template location and path helpers.
• Hybrid Template Hierarchy – Custom template hierarchy for themes.
• Hybrid Template Manager – Custom template registration system.
• Hybrid Theme – Theme filters, template tags, and helper functions.
• Hybrid Tools – General helper classes and functions.
• Hybrid View – PHP-based templating engine.

Overall, I am happy with the separation and have been testing the packages in a few personal projects. Documentation is a bit sparse (well, non-existent in many cases), but work is underway on that front.

The Hybrid Theme package is the only repo that I am unsure of. With block-based themes just around the corner, we will need to do a serious reevaluation of what the repo needs in the future.

We also have a brand new, standalone project named Hybrid Mix. It is a helper class for developers who compile assets with Laravel Mix. It allows you to grab asset URLs stored in your mix-manifest.json via PHP.

Soft Relaunch of ThemeHybrid.com

I am calling this a “soft relaunch” of Theme Hybrid because I am still working on a bit of a redesign and overhaul of the site itself. However, it is a shift of the site’s goals.

As most of you know, I closed down the business side of Theme Hybrid almost two years ago and took a fulltime job at WP Tavern. The goal was to always keep the site alive as a community-run project, and I had planned on doing this much sooner. However, my free time has been limited in the past couple of years. On top of the new job, I was also writing the second edition of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, which my co-authors and I published last year. Then, I bought a new home and moved in December. New homeownership is a ton of work. It is only now that I feel like I am settling in a bit. I apologize for the delay.

Going forward, Theme Hybrid will be a 100% $free and open community for anyone to participate in. Our Slack group is now free to join, and I will also be opening a GitHub discussion group soon.

Any tools through the Theme Hybrid brand will be available to theme and plugin authors with no expectations of a return (use as you want), but I am always happy to see others who want to contribute.

On a personal note, I will no longer be offering themes and plugins from this site. I will continue creating themes and plugins in the future, but they will simply be hosted elsewhere (more on this later).

If you’re an old-school Theme Hybrid member, I hope you enjoy what we have been working on. If you’re new around here, welcome to the community.