But first a quick intro: my first taste of anything CMS-like was Dreamweaver 1.0 from back in mid 1997. The “templates” feature (those pesky .dwt files) were amazing in their day for those of us not sure what an .ASP page was. Then followed ColdFusion and databases. Then ActionScript and Flash. Then followed PHP and more databases. Then Mambo. Then Joomla. Then several other CMS experiments including some homebrewed ones. Then sadness. Then Expression Engine and some joy. Then WordPress 2.8. Then Hybrid and a rebirth of web development joy. OK – done with that. You get the picture now.
So what is so great about the Hybrid theme framework? Here are 10 reasons you should check it out. No, I’m not on commission (like some, ahem, other framework situations out there). I’m an unpaid third-party end-user who pays his own way. But let’s get started.
10 Reasons to use the Hybrid Framework for WordPress
- Support Justin Tadlock has provided nothing short of exceptional support. Other forum members know this, and fully well understand the time and effort he puts into running the support forums and keeping up on Hybrid development. So forum members also do a great job helping out with support issues. The community is fantastic. All my support questions are at least responded to in a matter of hours, and not one has trailed off without being resolved. When you log in to the support area and your profile, the first thing you see is a list of your support questions in a super-clean list, with the time of the last update anyone has made to your request, along with their name. I love this feature because I can see my progress from the first question (how naive!) up to the present (a little less naive…). I find that on this or that tough topic, manh times I want to go back to the very-thorough answers that are provided for me and re-read. More often than not, Justin or someone else will provide a link to an external resource, usually one that needs to be read carefully. All of this astuteness makes one want to work hard not to post superfluous support questions and prove to the community that I can actually read. If it were only so on all forums :).
- Skeleton This is my favorite thing about Hybrid. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are a CSS Hero, it most certainly is. Skeleton is a Hybrid child theme with ZERO CSS defined. However, everything that can be defined (all the classes) are in the main CSS file ready and waiting for you to fill in the blank. A unique approach Justin takes is using careful indentation to organize the classes hierarchically, which makes scanning them even easier. So, as a developer, all you need to do is pop open Firefox with Firebug installed, hover over an element you want to style and it get the line number in the CSS. You pop over to your favorite editor, make a change in 2 seconds and refresh. Basically, you can take a simple PSD web design through this process in an hour or two and have a working template ready to go. Wow! This blog (bonfx.com) is a Hybrid child theme developed from Skeleton, by the way.
- CSS In addition to how the CSS is laid out (see “Skeleton” above), Hybrid also supplies ready-made access, commented out by default, to Eric Meyer’s Reset, The Holy Grail layout, several pixel-based line-height typography solutions, along with the option to include the most basic set of typography and formatting of the basic Hybrid theme. There is simply no way to lose if you know your way around CSS. It’s just a time saver. Never waste time on these repetitive web development chores again!
- Hybrid Themes Hybrid is a framework, but comes with a default theme called Hybrid. So, there is the Hybrid Framework with a base theme called Hybrid. But, there are also another half-dozen incredibly high-quality child themes ready and available for free. Hybrid News is very popular and is a much sought after layout. All of the templates are better quality than most templates you will come across. The code is lean and mean. They all share a sophisticated approach to typography and feature a tasteful and welcome use of white space in the layouts. Ahh…no gratuitous transparencies and glittery stuff cluttering up a too-busy layout!
- Child Themes Creating child themes are incredibly easy thanks to WordPress 2.9 combined with Hybrid’s unique development approach. You can take any of the themes (see “Skeleton” above) and quickly and easily create a variation of it without having to modify any of the source code. For instance, if you like Hybrid News child theme, but want to change several things around, following some simple instructions will set you up with your own “My Theme” ready to install in a development environment, and ready for you to customize away.
- Hybrid Hooks & Filters WordPress is known for it’s easy-to-use hooks and filters, once you know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, I can’t go into that here. Google it. But if you do know what they are, know that Hybrid offers many more unique hooks and filters to speed up the process of customizing your site to your hearts content. Hybrid is about reducing the amount of time spent coding to get to great customizations quickly. Take a look at this list here and you’ll see what I mean: Hybrid Hooks and Hybrid Filters.
- Hybrid Widgets One of the great features of WordPress is it’s widgets. It makes adding standard types of content to primary and secondary and other areas very easy. Hybrid takes and one-ups many of the stock WordPress widgets and adds a slew of features based on standard WordPress functions. Widget Logic is also available for all of the widgets, which allows you to control when and where and how each widget shows up using simple WordPress conditional statements, right in the widget flyout. So simple! Saves a lot of time!
- Search Engine Optimization There is no need for all kinds of plugins to optimize each post for search engines. While there are some great plugins out there for sure, Hybrid makes the need for them pretty much moot, as all the SEO functionality you are going to need (after your excellently-written and original content on a topic other than “ipods”, “how to make money blogging”, etc.) to get good site rankings is built right into the post form. It’s all right there. Install Hybrid and take a look! You don’t need anything else except good content and some goals.
- Free & Inexpensive at the same time Hybrid and it’s child themes are free for the taking. The code is GPL, and Justin Tadlock is vocally and thoroughly for the open source community. But what differentiates Hybrid from some of the other commercial CMS frameworks is that while the code is free, it’s support you have to pay for. But, a full year membership is only $25 bucks. The fee seems like it should be a lot more considering how much goes into Hybrid and what you get out of the support forums. I’m more than willing to pay that annually without thinking about it. It was clear from my time spent noodling around the site and the nonmember support area that the paid support was serious and high quality. It was also clear that Hybrid was a very serious product. I spent the bucks early in 2009 and honestly have to say it’s the best $25 bucks on anything web related I have ever spent in my 15 years of doing web development. I’ve paid ten-time as much for other licenses, and paid even more for other software packages and proprietary solutions. I’ve paid a lot more to consultants over the years too. Nothing beats, for me, so far, my investment in Hybrid. I encourage you to drop the bucks and jump in the deep end today. You won’t be disappointed. But if you are, feel free to complain to me here on the blog ;).
- I’m going to pull an old trick here and suggest you re-read reason #1 again. It’s so important, I wanted to mention it twice.
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