Justin Tadlock has announced the release of Hybrid Core, what he calls a “true development framework.” He originally announced that Hybrid Core was in the works about a year ago. In August, Justin explained the direction Core was taking in an interesting blog post about frameworks and parent themes and child themes and grandchild themes—you get the picture.

Justin is very upfront that his framework is built with developers in mind, and is likely not ideal for end users.

He describes the framework like this:

The framework takes an extremely modular approach. When creating themes, you only have to use the features that you want to use. It allows you to mix and match components to suit your projectís needs.

The parent themes can then be extended into simple to manipulate child themes by end users.

Hybrid Core is being released free and open source under version 2 of the GPL. An exclusive membership to Theme Hybrid costs $25 per year, which provides additional access to the support forums and tutorials.