Serious Eats used a very traditional approach to collard greens, cooking them with smoked ham hocks. Although I make collards often, I've never tried them with the ham hocks, mostly because I'm not real sure I could even find smoked ham hocks (I use bacon, which this recipe calls an acceptable substitution). Their wriiteup actually has a lot of alternatives.
One thing I like about their recipe is that it explicitly calls for cooking the collard greens a long time. Collards are a "hardy" leafy vegetable which requires a long simmer to get tender, as opposed to leafy vegetables like spinach or swiss chard which just take a few minutes. I've seen a lot of absolutely idiotic recipes that treat collards like it's spinach - simmer for just a few minutes. Great if you like chewy leather greens.
Collard greens, along with many other vegetables, are a victim of a trend that started some years ago. In the very old days vegetables were cooked to death. Julia Child was notoriously bad with vegetables, in one recipe for green beans she said to simmer them for like half an hour; at that point you could spread them with a knife like butter. So anyway a few years ago the culinary industry switched gears and started providing instructions to just simmer vegies for a short period of time, maybe 3 to less-than-10 minutes (depending on the vegie). This was when they invented a term I absolutely despise, "crisp-tender". It's one of the most over-used terms in cooking: "simmer the (fill in the vegie) just until it's crisp-tender". God I Hate That Phrase. Anyway as is usual when an about-face occurs, now people are vastly under-cooking many vegetables, and collard greens definitely fall in that category. Sorry morons but there are many vegetables that are better when fully cooked.
Rather than copy the recipe onto this page I'm simply linking to the original on Serious Eats, click here to view.