Justin Tadlock Releases Hybrid News Theme

Just Tadlock (community member greenshady) has released a new child theme based on his theme framework ‘ThemeHybrid‘. If we were playing a drinking game which would be acceptable considering this is a tavern, you folks ought to be drunk by now. With that said, the Hybrid News theme features much of what you would expect a newsy type theme to have with a bit of Justin’s magic thrown in.

Hybrid News Theme In Action

Featured post block which is animated

Post thumbnails for articles on the front page

Four widget areas in the footer

Two right handed skinny sidebars

Featured video block

Four-level drop-down menu

A Tabber that features Hot Tags, Random Posts, and your Archives

Fully compliant with WordPress 2.7

Giving the theme a good look over from the demo which is located here, looks like Hybrid News could easily fit the bill for many of you still looking for a free, news layout type of theme. One thing I noticed which is really nice is that, the post thumbnails as well as the featured posts appear to take the first image which shows up in the post content and uses that as the thumbnail, scaling down or up in size automatically. This is a huge time saver, especially compared to the way in which I currently have to apply an image URL to a post_thumbnail custom field for it to work properly in the theme WPTavern is using.