A year or so ago, I talked a bit about releasing a starter-type theme to make it easier for theme authors who wanted to learn to use the Hybrid Core framework. At the same time, I also wanted something to allow me to quickly build out the HTML and basic WordPress templates for themes. So, Hybrid Base was born.

However, it’s been a long road. I’ve thrown out about 10 different good, solid ideas for this theme over the course of the last year. Finally, I came up with something that’s not too heavy on dev stuff and focuses more on the essentials of creating WordPress themes.

What’s under the hood?

You won’t find 100s of hooks or complicated PHP code in Hybrid Base. It’s simple HTML with a light mix of the appropriate WordPress template tags and Hybrid Core functions.

There’s a base style.css file with a structured, hierarchical view of most of the things you’d need to create style rules for with a WordPress theme. You can use it or just delete it and start from scratch.

Of course, the Hybrid Core framework is packaged within it (note that this is a sub-module on GitHub, so you’ll want to make sure your Git clone is recursive). Many of the most-used features of the framework are enabled by default, so you’ll be able to see how they work.

Who can use the theme?

I can’t stress this enough — this theme is for theme developers. It’s not a parent theme that you build child themes for. It’s not a theme you’ll get updates for (though you’ll want to keep Hybrid Core updated). You literally have to go into the theme code and make edits. It’s for creating new themes.

So, this theme is for:

• Me: I plan to make this the base of future themes. In fact, the Chun theme was a first test run of using it.
• Freelance Developers: This theme should make it even quicker for you to build out client sites than just using Hybrid Core from scratch.
• Theme Authors: You can also make free public or commercial parent themes from this theme. It’s a good starting point.

What’s in store for the future?

This is an experiment as much as anything else. Hybrid Base is going to be the foundation of whatever current theme development philosophy I have. This changes over time as I become a better developer and when WordPress adds in new theme-relevant features. So, I can’t say for certain what the future direction of this theme is.

The idea is that both you and I have a base to build from that reflects the current best practices of theme development at any given time.

Where can I download it?

At this time, I’m only making the theme available via its GitHub repository. The reason for this is that any theme author who builds from Hybrid Core should be familiar with using Git. You’ll need to know how to use it to get proper and timely updates of the framework.

You can also find this information on the Hybrid Base theme page.

I hope you all enjoy this release and start making some awesome themes.

Today, I’m happy to announce James Geiger’s new theme, Seamless.

James runs the Web site called Seamless Themes (currently in development). Soon, it will be a new commercial WordPress theme site. So, you’ll get to see even more themes launched off the Hybrid platform. You can follow James @SeamlessThemes on Twitter.

Seamless Theme

While Seamless can be installed just like any other WordPress theme, it was actually created as a development tool for making mobile-first, responsive WordPress themes. What this means is that you can take it, add some nice colors and images, and mold the theme into something even more beautiful. Or, if you’re into simple, minimalist design, simply take the theme and install it as is.

Seamless is also written in SCSS to help speed up development, so it can be extended with SASS and Compass. However, you can go the normal CSS route if you want and not worry about SCSS.

Seamless uses most of the Hybrid Core features, so it’s a good starting point in seeing how to make a responsive theme for Hybrid Core.

You can check out the demo, see all the theme features, and download the theme from the Seamless theme page.

Everyone, welcome James to our growing community of theme authors here and congratulate him on a job well done with Seamless.

Marga Satrya has the honor of releasing our 10th community-built theme on Theme Hybrid. It’s a beauty too.

Satu

Satu is built with HTML5 and is responsive, so it’ll look good on any device. It’s an elegant one-column theme that really shines when it comes to post formats. It works well as a personal blogging theme, but it would make a great photoblogging theme as well.

Just because it’s one column doesn’t mean it doesn’t support widgets. The theme has a nicely-designed section in the footer to house your widgets.

I’m a big fan of one-column themes, at least when they’re done right. Satu is done right. The great thing about one-column themes is that they show off what’s truly important about a Web site — the content. Get rid of the junk and focus on what matters.

You can download the theme and view a live demo from the Satu theme page.

Everyone should congratulate Satrya on a job well done with this theme and welcome him to the rank of theme author on this site. Also, you can follow him on Twitter at @msattt.

PaulWP.com

Paul On WordPress is Paul’s WordPress-focused site. He blogs about general Web development and cool WordPress stuff. He’s available for hire for your custom WordPress projects.

You can also follow Paul on Twitter at @paul_wp.

Spine

Spine is a responsive WordPress theme built off the Foundation front-end framework. Of course, it’s also built off Hybrid Core and supports most of its features like all themes here. It even includes a custom color picker on top of that.

As you can see, Paul is even using this theme on his own Web site. I love it when theme authors do that.

If you’re interested in a beautiful theme with some custom color variations, you should check out Spine. Also, be sure to thank Paul for his awesome work and for giving back to the Theme Hybrid and WordPress communities.

There’s also some more great themes coming this way soon from other community members, but for now, let’s take a look at David’s work.

Shellcreeper.com

When he isn’t helping around the Theme Hybrid forums, David has been doing some awesome plugin and theme work at Shellcreeper. Keep an eye out on his site for an upcoming plugin he’s been building for all themes built off Hybrid Core.

If you’re interested, he has a commercial theme built off Hybrid Core called Genbu.

You can also follow David @turtlepod on Twitter.

Shell Theme

Shell isn’t exactly a brand new theme. But, it’s a brand new take on an old theme. Shell is a responsive version of the Prototype theme.

I know many of you have been asking me to build a responsive base theme, but since several community members have been working on it, I decided to see what they’d come up with.

Shell is a great starting point for building a responsive child theme. The work is already done for you. You can use the theme as-is or create your own styles within a custom child theme. As with most themes here, it supports many of the awesome features of the Hybrid Core framework.

Everyone, please welcome David to the rank of Theme Author and congratulate him on his work. Then, be sure to download and give his Shell theme a try.

Since portfolios aren’t built into WordPress, we’d need a custom post type and taxonomy to handle the required base elements of a portfolio. Sure, I could slap together 20 lines of code from a popular tutorial, throw it into my theme’s functions.php, and call it a day, but that’s not how post types work exactly.

Today, I’m simultaneously releasing a plugin and a theme for you creative people who want to share your work with the world: Custom Content Portfolio (plugin) and Chun (theme).

Chun WordPress theme

Other than just creating a portfolio theme, I wanted to try out some newer techniques with HTML5 and CSS3. This entire theme is built with no images or JavaScript on the front end. It was pretty fun to play around with CSS transitions for some neat effects that I’ve only done in the past with jQuery.

This also means that IE8 and below are not supported at all with this theme. Technically, the official policy here is to support the latest two versions of Internet Explorer, which includes 9 and 10. This is just the first theme I’m intentionally not testing in 8.

Some other new bits of functionality I’m trying out within the WordPress theme customizer are:

• Font selector: This allows you to choose from a set of pre-selected fonts to use with the theme. This also means that if a font doesn’t work for your language, there’s always another option (I know some people will like this).
• Color selector: You won’t have total control over the design of the theme with this, but you’ll get to choose the base colors for the theme. This will give you the ability to add a personal touch to the design with a few clicks.

So, the Chun theme is a bit experimental in more ways than one. I went a little wild (at least wilder than usual) with theme features. I wanted to try some fun things, and I think these things came together into a nice package in the end.

You can view the demo and download the theme from the Chun theme page.

Custom Content Portfolio plugin

Custom Content Portfolio is a base portfolio plugin for other developers to build from. bbPress does forums. BuddyPress does social networks. Custom Content Portfolio does portfolios. Of course, this is just version 0.1, so I kept the features to a minimum. I’d rather get feedback from users before throwing every feature imaginable into this thing.

The great thing about this plugin from a theme author’s perspective is that you don’t have to worry about the functionality. It’s already done for you. You can stick to designing themes.

Other than the Chun theme I’m releasing today, Adroa already supports this plugin out of the box. I’ll also be updating Picturesque to do the same in the near future. Very soon, you’ll have three portfolio themes to choose from. I can only hope that more theme developers hop on the bandwagon and make themes for this plugin too. Only an extra template or two is required along with some custom CSS.

For users, this plugin does a few things:

• Gives you a new menu item called “Portfolio” in the admin.
• Adds a new taxonomy (like tags) called “Portfolio,” which allows you to create an unlimited number of portfolios.
• Creates a new post type (like posts) called “Portfolio Item,” which you can use to create individual items for your various portfolios.

It’s dead simple to use. There’s no configuration involved. You just plug and play.

You can download this plugin from the Custom Content Portfolio plugin page.

Enjoy the plugin+theme combo

This is just the beginning. I have other plans for theme and plugin combinations like this to handle some of the needs I see coming out of the WordPress community.

For now, enjoy putting together your portfolios.

Today, I am happy to announce that Hybrid Core 1.5 is officially out. You can grab the latest copy from the Hybrid Core page.

What’s new?

One of the biggest changes I’ve made is I’ve gone through and updated the formatting on a large portion of the code to make it even easier for developers to read. I’ll continue this process through version 1.6 as well. Several bugs have also been squashed as a direct result of community input and feedback.

While the following is not a complete list of all the changes, it does represent the major areas (plus features) that were added or modified in this release.

• Allow for comments template based off post type (e.g., comments-post.php, comments-page.php, etc.).
• Theme customizer section added for the Theme Layouts extension that allows user to choose a global layout.
• Added a random background generator.
• Added a featured header image extension.
• Added a post format tools extension.
• Added the Hybrid Core Scripts loader feature.
• Added the Hybrid Core Styles loader feature.
• Added a permanent “Customize” link under the “Appearance” menu for users to quickly access the theme customizer.
• Added the hybrid_locate_theme_file() function for loading JavaScript, CSS, and images in the same way that WordPress’ locate_template() loads templates.
• Post Stylesheets extension now has a drop-down select instead of a text input for choosing a per-post stylesheet.
• Handle multiple queried archives in the global context instead of choosing the first archive.
• Breadcrumb Trail:
  • Breadcrumb Trail extension now supports even more custom scenarios.
  • Archive-type and single post pagination is now supported in breadcrumbs.
  • Added support for individual sites in a multisite network.
  • Handles attachments in breacrumbs for post types other than “post”.
• Widgets:
  • Wrap “none-styled” authors in Authors widget with <p> tag.
  • Removed the walker option from the Nav Menu widget.
  • Added the order option to the Archives widget.

You can view the complete history of the changes on the Hybrid Core 1.5 commit page.

New tutorials

To go with the newly-added features, I’ve written a few new tutorials:

• Random Custom Background
• Featured Header
• Post Format Tools
• Scripts Loader
• Styles Loader
• Theme Layouts (important updates)

Other things of note

SEO: As of today, I am officially announcing that themes built off the Hybrid Core framework should not use the Hybrid Core SEO feature any longer. The code was originally added to the framework because it was for my personal blog. Well, the entire framework was originally built for my personal blog. However, this is obviously no longer the case. This has been an unwritten rule for some time. I’m just making it official now.

SEO is better handled by plugins like WP SEO, which is the SEO plugin that I officially endorse. I will also be more than happy to help anyone who has used this feature in the past port their data over to the plugin.

Hybrid theme stylesheets: In version 1.6, the following Hybrid theme stylesheets (located in /library/css) will be removed from the framework.

• 2c-l-fixed.css
• 2c-r-fixed.css
• 3c-l-fixed.css
• 3c-r-fixed.css
• 3c-c-fixed.css
• holy-grail-fluid.css
• plugins.css
• screen.css

These files have long been moved to the Hybrid theme’s /css folder. There’s no need for them to be in the framework taking up space on users’ sites who do not use that theme.

So, if you’re importing any of those stylesheets, make sure to import them from the correct place. I’m more than willing to help you out with this in the support forums if you need help.

With that said, I’m happy to announce the release of the Adroa theme by Thiago Senna. This is Thiago’s second theme for the community and the 7th theme released here by a Theme Hybrid member.

Adroa

Adroa is a beautifully-designed blog and portfolio theme. Thiago designed it for photographers and photobloggers to show off their work. It supports most of the standard Hybrid Core features just like many other themes here.

It supports a new Hybrid Core feature called “Featured Image Header” that allows you to have per-post header images. This is something we’re currently testing out, so it’s nice to see it in real-world use while I finalize the details for this upcoming feature that will be available to all theme authors building off Hybrid Core.

The theme officially supports my newest plugin, Grid Columns, which allows you to create columnized content via a shortcode. It’s also the first theme to have built-in styles and templates for my portfolio plugin, which is something I’m hoping will make it easier for theme authors to build awesome portfolio themes.

Adroa has some awesome features and is bringing plenty of new stuff to users of this community. I applaud Thiago for taking on these new features and giving them a good first run before anyone else (even me).

Everyone, please give a big congratulations to Thiago and thank him for making this theme available.

Sinisa runs a fairly new site called ThemesBros, so I encourage you to bookmark it for when he starts adding more content. Even though his site is still a little sparse in content, he’s created an awesome theme to share with you all.

Sukelius Magazine

Sukelius Magazine is a blog/news theme that has a featured content slider, five widget areas, and flexible footer widgets. It allows you to choose from multiple layouts, has two nav menu locations, and supports WordPress post formats. It also provides support for some social networking profiles.

It uses pretty much every Hybrid Core feature out of the box, so you get awesomeness like breadcrumbs, post thumbnails, and theme layouts. It’s translatable like all other themes here. Plus, it uses WordPress design features like the custom header and background features.

Everyone, be sure to thank Sinisa for the awesome theme and for contributing back to the WordPress and Theme Hybrid communities. You can download and demo the theme from the Sukelius Magazine page.