#1 Millions of Users

A month ago, Brian Krogsgard posted a great piece called On WordPress themes and frameworks. In the “Drop-In Frameworks” section of the article, he mentioned, “Drop-in frameworks are probably the least known and worst marketed theme frameworks available today.”

That statement is so true.

As many of you know, I have a [drop-in] theme framework for WordPress called Hybrid Core. Part of the reason I think these types of frameworks are often not known about is because most of what they do is behind the scenes. They’re not at the forefront of everything like themes typically are. So, they don’t get much attention.

Another reason is that there are so few of these frameworks around. Not to mention, the guys who built these things are horrible at marketing. I’m so bad at marketing that I’m going to publish this post at 12 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

This is the first of many posts I plan to write to rectify this situation. So, reason #1 of 101:

1,748,663 downloads

As of right now, there are 1,748,663 downloads of WordPress themes built off the Hybrid Core framework on the WordPress.org theme repository. That’s not a bad number.

No, all of those themes were not created by me. Here’s a list of all the theme author profiles I used to gather this data (ordered by number of theme downloads).

Theme shops/clubs

While the official home of Hybrid Core is at Theme Hybrid, other theme sites use the framework as their foundation.

The following is a list of my favorite theme sites using Hybrid Core.

Of course, other theme shops use the framework. Some use it as their foundation on sites like ThemeForest. Others, like WooThemes, integrate parts of Hybrid Core into their own code.

Freelancers and design agencies

Brian Krogsgard, the lead WordPress developer at Infomedia, uses it in their projects (I really wanted to just link back to Brian since he’s such an awesome guy).

I could, of course, go through a list of the 100s of freelancers and design companies who are using it every day, but it’d take me a while to gather up all those names.

What does it all add up to?

Hybrid Core powers millions of sites across the Web.

I don’t usually think about it that way. But, when I start looking at the sheer numbers, it overwhelms me sometimes. I’m the sole developer behind a project that gets used that much. Of course, I’m fortunate enough to have a ton of help and feedback from other developers and designers who are making use of the framework.

Mostly, I’m glad I just haven’t completely destroyed too many sites yet. :)

I’ve focused a lot in this post on the people developing/designing with Hybrid Core. The reason for this is because they represent those millions of users and sites. Without all these great folks building off the framework, well, I suppose all those users would have to use something else.

The point is that the Hybrid Core framework has been in development for 5 years now. It’s battle-tested, has a few scars, and keeps on keepin’ on. It’s possible that millions of users could be wrong, but I’m not betting against them.

I left a lot of names and links off the list above. I'm sorry if I overlooked you. There are so many great people doing great things, that it's hard to keep track of them all. Just know that I appreciate all your work. Feel free to drop a link in the comments if you build with Hybrid Core.