Therefore, if your access to the support forums is suddenly blocked, it just means your membership has already expired (Theme Hybrid memberships are for one year). You can renew your membership for an additional year by visiting the club page.

Sorry for the inconvenience (though I’m sure some of you enjoyed the few extra months of free forums access). I just wanted to let everyone know what was happening.

If you run into any trouble, just shoot me an email via the contact form.

It’s a new year though. There’s tons of things to get done on my end, but I want to get your feedback first to make a better experience for you all.

So, please take a few minutes and participate in the 2012 Theme Hybrid Survey.

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.

Paul de Wouters just opened up a new WordPress services site called WP Consult. What’s so great about it (other than the cool design) is that he built the site off the Hybrid Core framework.

Many of you might recognize Paul as one of the awesome people who helps out around the support forums here at Theme Hybrid.

This is awesome for the Theme Hybrid community as you’ll have another option if you’re looking for custom development or maintenance work. Paul is pretty familiar with Hybrid Core and themes built off it. Plus, if he ever has a question, you know he’ll have me backing him up.

I encourage you to check out his site and contact him if you need any custom work done.

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).

• Download theme
• Demo theme
• Sample child theme

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.

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).

• Download theme
• Demo theme
• Sample child theme

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.

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?

Running on the Hybrid Core framework

Hybrid is now completely running on the Hybrid Core framework. This was a big job because there was a ton of legacy code in the theme that needed to be separated from the framework.

What does all this mean? To the average user, not much. You’ll be able to go about your life without having to worry about all this stuff. To the developer, it means that you have a lot more tools at your disposal. It also means that all themes on this site will have the same, underlying code base.

What? Something’s different?

For those of you upgrading to version 0.9, you’ll likely notice there’s a number of changes, particularly with some settings. I typically leave code docs to exclusive members, but some of these changes have an effect on everyone. So, I wanted all Hybrid theme users to be able to see this. Keep reading if you want to know about a particular change.

Templates gone

Many of the templates have been removed. The massive number of templates in the theme before were meant to be a guide on what types of templates could be created in themes. Essentially, 99% of the code was being duplicated in these templates. Hybrid has always been about code reuse, so any unneeded templates were removed. Don’t worry though; if you’re overwriting a template that’s no longer in the Hybrid theme from within your child theme, it will still work.

For those of you that are familiar with how the template hierarchy works, you’ll now have an easier time overwriting templates globally.

Menus/widgets disappeared?

Since Hybrid is now running fully on the Hybrid Core framework, a few sidebars or menus might need to be reset. This isn’t a tough solution. Just go to Appearance > Menus and Appearance > Widgets and make sure everything is in order after upgrading.

Drop-downs script setting

In previous versions of the theme, you could check a box to disable the Superfish drop-downs JavaScript. Now, this is always turned on. However, you do have the option of disabling this. Add this code into your theme setup function within your child theme’s functions.php file.

remove_theme_support( 'hybrid-core-drop-downs' );

SEO setting

The SEO settings are now on by default. If you need to disable these, add this line of code to your theme setup function in your child theme’s fuctions.php file.

remove_theme_support( 'hybrid-core-seo' );

Feed links setting

I’ve never liked this setting because there are better, non-theme ways to redirect feed links. Check out this tutorial if you want to set a custom feed link.

Emphasis on theme setup functions

One of the things I started doing when I released the Hybrid Core framework was putting more emphasis on theme setup functions. You probably noticed I mentioned this a couple of times in the section above. Basically, it’s a way for themes to fire their functionality at certain points. A child theme setup function allows you to load your child theme functionality after the parent theme, which makes it easy to enable/disable things and not have the parent theme overwrite your changes.

So, if you’re not already doing this, I highly recommend creating a theme setup function within your child theme’s functions.php file that looks like this:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_child_theme_setup', 11 );

function my_child_theme_setup() {

	/* Use add_action(), add_filter(), add_theme_support(), and remove_theme_support() calls here. */
}

I’ll likely mention this in the support forums for those of you editing your functions files, so it will be nice for you to have this set up beforehand.

This is only for people that modify their child theme’s functions.php file. If you don’t ever touch this file, don’t worry about it.

Download

Before downloading the latest version, be certain that you’re running at least version 3.1 of WordPress. The theme will not work with older versions.

You can upgrade from the themes section in your WordPress admin or grab the latest copy from the Hybrid theme page.

I hope you all enjoy this release. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop by the support forums.

One of the goals of this site has always been to offer free and open source WordPress themes, plugins, and other nifty things. Those of you that know me know that I’m a big supporter of open-source projects. This is something that won’t be changing.

New philosophy on building parent themes

First, I wanted to start by saying that this isn’t really a “new” philosophy for me. It’s something I’ve had in mind for a long time. It just took a while to get to the point I wanted to be at.

Months before Theme Hybrid ever opened its doors, I started the initial work on Hybrid Core. It’s always been buried in the site’s flagship theme, Hybrid, so the core framework has gotten plenty of use. Yep, we’ved dragged it through the mud a time or two. It’s a veteran in many ways, but it’s still in its infancy as a viable framework solution for other developers.

New themes released on this site will be parent themes. Many of you are used to seeing child themes for a single parent theme.

I know some of you have been frustrated when trying to mold a single theme into something it’s not or when putting together 20kb+ function files. I know I have. More than anything, it’s been a energy-draining process trying to come up with creative ways to do things that could be done in an easier way.

Many of you have even asked the question, “How do I update my child theme?” The new goal is for you to never have to ask that question. Since new themes will be parent themes, your child theme will never have to be updated, providing you with the most future-proof way of running your site as possible.

New philosophy on building child themes

Just because new themes will most likely be parent themes, it doesn’t mean there’ll never be a child theme released here. Actually, that couldn’t be further from what I’d like to do.

Essentially, any child themes released will be nothing more than a design, a style.css file. Stylesheets rarely need an update, so you likely won’t see child themes being updated on the site.

I’d like to stay away from advanced child themes. These are the child themes with extra templates and lots of functions (things that can’t be updated). A prime example of this is the Hybrid News theme. If I built that theme today, it would be a parent theme. Then, I might build child themes with different designs. For example, you might have child themes with red, green, yellow, and purple designs. Each child theme would offer a unique design for the given markup of its parent theme.

This has always been the intended use of child themes in WordPress, so it’s the direction we’ll be going in.

Changes on the site

For the past few weeks, there’s been a good discussion on the future direction of the site in the support forums. I’ve gotten some invaluable feedback from many members, and I still encourage more discussion on that topic.

The biggest changes I’d like to make happen in 2011 are the following:

• Put more focus on the many plugins I’ve written. Right now, they don’t get much attention here.
• A dedicated documentation portal to make theme/plugin docs easier to find.
• A code snippet database for finding quick snippets of code, especially for commonly-asked functionality in the support forums.
• Allow user submissions to the showcase.
• Add WordPress e-books to the selection of tools for the members here (more on this later).
• Allow theme developers to host their parent themes (built of Hybrid Core) and child themes on the site.

All of these things won’t happen overnight. It’ll take some time and ideas may change as I get deeper into the process of putting all of these pieces together. Feel free to leave your feedback on things you’d like to see in 2011 for Theme Hybrid.

I hope all of you have a great New Year’s Eve and look forward to seeing what we accomplish in the coming year.

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.

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).

• Download theme
• Demo theme
• Sample child theme

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.