Hybrid Core 3.0, developed by Justin Tadlock, is available for download. More than a year in the making, 3.0 has over 269 commits and a slew of new features.
After the release of Hybrid Core 2.0 last year, Tadlock assumed it would be at least two years before he tackled another major release, “I’d planned on doing minor and patch releases for a while, all along building themes,” he said.
“However, a lot has changed in the theming world in just the past year. WordPress has added a lot of cool features for theme authors that were previously handled by Hybrid Core,” Tadlock said.
Tadlock wants the project to feel fresh and one way to do that is to remove features that are handled natively by WordPress. Features removed from Hybrid Core include:
- Atomic hooks functionality.
- Random Custom Background extension.
- Featured Header extension.
- Cleaner Caption extension (handled in WP).
- Loop title/description (replaced by WP).
- Pagination (replaced by WP).
It’s clear that the customizer in WordPress is here to stay and will be an important part of the project’s future. Hybrid Core 3.0 adds a variety of enhancements that make the customizer more flexible, these include:
- Color Palette.
- Multiple Checkbox.
- Dropdown Terms.
- Layout.
- Radio Image.
- Select Group.
- Multiple Select.
There’s also a few customizer setting classes:
- Array Map.
- Image Data.
Tadlock Experiments with Community-driven Documentation
One of the largest changes to the Hybrid project is opening up documentation to be community-driven. The Hybrid Core wiki hosted on Github is now open to contributions from the community.
Tadlock believes that this will drive adoption of the framework by more theme authors, “The more developers we have using and contributing to the project, the better,” he said.
If the community responds well to the experiment, it will allow Tadlock to focus on longer-form tutorials for club members, something he feels he’s better at doing than reference style documentation.
Hybrid Core 3.0 includes a number of features, bug fixes, and improvements. If you want to see all of the changes in 3.0, check out the lengthy changelog.
Now, we just need to get the ball rolling with some documentation in the wiki pages. It’s pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll get there in the coming months. I’ll be able to transfer some existing docs over. One of my big hopes is that this move frees me up to put more focus back on theme users, which make up for the bulk of Theme Hybrid’s user base.
Thanks for the coverage, Jeff.