This week I’m going to take a look at the Hybrid Parent Theme and some of its lovely children. Before I started looking into this I was going to talk about the Hybrid Theme “Framework” but after reading this post by Justin Tadlock (Hybrid’s Developer) I realised it is much more accurate to call it a Parent Theme. If you’re interested in Theme Frameworks and terminology you should definitely look at his post. Or, if you want to download the Hybrid Theme Framework you could download Hybrid Core, which was released a few months ago.
Hybrid is a WordPress parent theme which has spawned a huge number of children. It was developed by Justin Tadlock and has been in circulation for quite a few years now.
Features
- Search Engine Optimized
- 15 Page Templates
- 8 Widget Ready Areas
- Dedicated plugins specific to the Hybrid Theme
- Translated into more than 20 languages
Our Mini Review
Hybrid is a fantastic theme for building your own child themes. It’s flexible, easy to set up and perfect for anyone who is making their first forays into theme development. If you want additional support and tutorials then you can sign up for the premium Hybrid Theme club. Also, Justin Tadlock’s blog is definitely worth keeping up to date with.
Rating: 
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Hybrid is a great parent theme. However, as you said, it has been around a few years, and Prototype is actually Justin’s newest parent theme built on Hybrid Core. There are a lot of advantages to using Prototype, because it is even more flexible than Hybrid and utilizes many of the new built in features of Core.
From my understanding, Justin is going away from one or two parent themes and that users tweak beyond preferred levels (which is what a lot of “frameworks” are actually doing). Instead the idea is to release more parent themes built on Hybrid Core that can utilize pretty minimal customizations (css and a couple of functions) into child themes.
You still get the benefit of simpler updates over using one off themes though, because the base of the parent theme that will most likely need updating down the line is in a dedicated subfolder (Hybrid Core).
While I think more and more people will continue to use ThemeHybrid themes and build themes off of Hybrid Core, I think Hybrid (the parent theme) will not be used as much going forward unless it is overhauled to be equipped with Hybrid Core.
Brian, that’s right. More focus will be put on building parent themes that utilize the Hybrid Core framework. There’ll be less focus on the Hybrid parent theme after its update to run off the latest version of the framework.
The users get the biggest benefit of all: hassle-free upgrades. And, developers gain more control and flexibility.
Siobhan, thanks for featuring my theme.
Thanks for the comments guys. I’ve been playing around with Prototype and no doubt will feature it in the future!