Use Justin Tadlock's Hybrid Base for Your New Theme

And I must stress new theme – you see, this wasn’t created for people to create child themes on (it’s no parent good sir!) but rather for creating entirely new themes. If you’re not a developer than you can probably move on.

But if you’re interested in looking at how Justin sees WordPress development, how he’s implemented it with the Hybrid Core Framework, then you might want to dive in:

You won’t find 100s of hooks or complicated PHP code in Hybrid Base. It’s simple HTML with a light mix of the appropriate WordPress template tags and Hybrid Core functions.

There’s a base style.css file with a structured, hierarchical view of most of the things you’d need to create style rules for with a WordPress theme. You can use it or just delete it and start from scratch.

Of course, the Hybrid Core framework is packaged within it (note that this is a sub-module on GitHub, so you’ll want to make sure your Git clone is recursive). Many of the most-used features of the framework are enabled by default, so you’ll be able to see how they work.

You can get it directly off Github and even fork it if you’d like:

I love that graphic.

One of the things of note that I really like about this particular angle and approach is that Justin is unashamed about his motive and his goals:

This is an experiment as much as anything else. Hybrid Base is going to be the foundation of whatever current theme development philosophy I have. This changes over time as I become a better developer and when WordPress adds in new theme-relevant features. So, I can’t say for certain what the future direction of this theme is.

The idea is that both you and I have a base to build from that reflects the current best practices of theme development at any given time.

Which means that if you agree with his development philosophy and it changes then you’ll have to change as well. If you’re a commitment-phobe then it’s definitely not something you’ll want to look into, but if you like the challenge of working with someone who’s been around for sometime and who is always interested in refining his approach then you might want to tag along for the adventure.

Who knows where it’ll head and where you may find it in a few months or years from now, but we all could pleasantly be surprised.