Theme Hybrid, the WordPress theme club founded by Justin Tadlock, has a new look. Justin’s been teasing the new design for a couple of months, and it went live yesterday. It’s a lot more than a new design though, as he totally reworked the site, with documentation and usability in mind.
Justin has a slew of free WordPress themes and plugins that he maintains utilizing a $25 per year support / membership business model. As an unabashed fan of his plugins and especially his Hybrid Core theme framework, the new site really makes the documentation and tutorials shine.
The redesign includes revamped sections with post types for tutorials, code snippets, php classes, constants, functions, hooks, and shortcodes. In addition to the new site structure, he’s finishing up what he calls some “dark magic” with Gravity Forms to handle the site’s membership system. He’s also working out details to allow club members to submit their own themes to Theme Hybrid, which I find exciting.
One thing that intrigued me in the announcement post is a tease for an upcoming book he’s a part of. Many know him as a co-author of the Professional WordPress Plugin Development book, but his role in this book will be a bit different. He’ll be publishing it as an e-book, and not going through a publisher. Justin is also an editor for the upcoming, updated, edition of the Smashing WordPress book, written by Thord Daniel Hedengren, which will be released this spring.
If you’ve ever had a desire to learn more from Justin than you undoubtedly already have from his popular tutorials, then it may be a good time to check out Theme Hybrid. And you may see me scrounging around the forums as well.
Some screenshots of the new design are below:
