2011-09-12

Yes, you read that right. Hybrid Core has been updated to version 1.2 and includes all new goodies for you theme developers. There’s even a few user-friendly changes in this version.

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.

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