The Font Awesome plugin has experienced some fatal error

Thanks for giving it a try, @kliyo35.

We’re calling it a release candidate because we’ve still got some of these issues to work out that didn’t yet shown up in our development environment during test. I’ll aim to fix this one today.

Could you let me know which version you were using when you saw that error? The latest at this time is 4.0.0-rc3. You can see the plugin version in the plugin’s list in the dashboard.

This is also be the kind of issue that will disappear once the plugin retrieves the data it seems to be lacking, which is the Font Awesome version metadata it pulls from fontawesome.com. So until I get the bug fixed, it may work to simply reload the admin dashboard (or any other page, really) a time or two.

Hi mlwilkerson,

It’s a new install of WordPress 5.0. I used to install Better Font Awesome plugin but I saw the official plugin so I wanted to try it.

It’s 4.0.0-rc3 version. Install from plugin install page. No other plugin. I use Divi theme.

Screenshot : https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2018/50/3/1544625566-screencapture-2018-12-12-15-31-43.png
https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2018/50/3/1544625570-screencapture-2018-12-12-15-33-46.png

Domain name is not configured. I use my own DNS for dev.

Thank you !

Thanks, I’ve identified the bug and am now working on the fix. I plan to update soon.

I’ve just released 4.0.0-rc4. Could you try updating to that one?

Hi mlwilkerson,

Now, with 4.0.0-rc5, I have this error :
“The Font Awesome plugin has experienced a fatal error : Sorry, your WordPress server was unable to contact the Font Awesome server to retrieve available releases data. Most likely, just re-loading this page to get it try again should work. But if you’re running WordPress offline, from an airplane, or in some other way that blocks your WordPress server from reaching fontawesome.com, then that will block you from proceeding until you can connect successfully.”

I work in local. So I must use another plugin ?

Thank you

At this time, yes, this plugin is designed to serve icons from a CDN, which assumes that the client and server are both on the internet and can reach both fontawesome.com (for icon metadata) and either use.fontawesome.com for the Free CDN or pro.fontawesome.com for the Pro CDN.

Given the fact that other plugins and themes who load Font Awesome also seemed to tend toward loading from various CDNs, this seemed pretty normal to take that as a first approach.

Though now that you’ve raised the issue, I’ll grant that the old plugin that this new one replaces, shipped the Font Awesome 3 icon assets with the plugin code, and so loaded them locally (i.e. “self-hosting”).

Unfortunately, that approach isn’t very practical when it comes to version and dependency management. And it’s actually prohibited when it comes to Font Awesome Pro, since Pro licenses don’t permit distributing Font Awesome Pro in open source software like this plugin.

So yes, for now, I’d say that you should either try a different plugin, or, if you know you need to be able to work locally, I would recommend not using a plugin but just self-hosting.

To self-host: Download a recent version of Font Awesome 5 Free, unzip it and copy the assets you want to load (either the webfont/css or svg/js) into an appropriate folder in your WordPress or theme installation, and then perhaps in your theme’s functions.php enqueue it. That will forfeit most of the advantages and features of this plugin, but it will get you the icons working, and working in a local environment.

Or, if you were satisfied with the previous 3.2.1 release of the old plugin here, you could download that older version to continue using in local.