Favicon on RSS Feed Pages

Hi Julie,

Thank you for your feeedback! I didn’t know the RSS clients could use /favicon.ico.

About putting the icon files in the root directory: this is already what the plugin does… well… tries to do. As you notice, it always puts the icons in a dedicated sub-directory. Then, if possible, it uses the Rewrite API to expose the icon files as if they were in the root directory (this is the technique WP uses to customize the post URLs). So you can often get your icon with www.yourblog.com/favicon.ico. But not always, for some reasons. For example, many security plugins forbid it. So as of today, “RSS favicon available via /favicon.ico” is not advertisable, since it won’t work everywhere.

The planned solution is to replace the recent “Site icon” feature of WP, which includes a dedicated RSS icon. I don’t know exactly how RSS works but I know the icon can be explicitly declared in the feed. This is the reliable solution.

Site icon replacement is a long due TODO. And because it’s not an easy task, I’m afraid that won’t be released before at least a few weeks.

Cheers!
Philippe

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Philippe.

About putting the icon files in the root directory: this is already what the plugin does… well… tries to do. As you notice, it always puts the icons in a dedicated sub-directory. Then, if possible, it uses the Rewrite API to expose the icon files as if they were in the root directory

Alright, so it seems that it’s not working for me then, because all the link tags added by FbRFG have the same structure as the following shortcut icon tag (all FbRFG image files are in the uploads/fbrfg folder):

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/favicon.ico">

Is it something in a site’s settings that would affect this? Permalink settings, or perhaps a security plugin that would prevent it? Now I’m curious for how many plugin users this is an issue…

Huh. Just stumbled upon this, thought it might be worth noting here as well… Not sure if the plugin takes care of this at the moment, since I’ve disabled embeds… https://benandjacq.com/2015/12/how-to-display-your-favicon-in-an-embedded-wordpress-post/

Actually the presence of paths such as /wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/favicon.ico in your code is normal, it’s always that way. Because I forgot to mention a point: when the rewriting (ie. ‘/favicon.ico) fails, it often fails silently, without the plugin being notified about this. So it always chooses the safe way (ie./wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/favicon.ico`).

What you can do to test your site is to fire https://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico with your browser.

The first versions of the plugin were more reckless, trying to take advantage of the rewrite API as much as possible. But many people reported issues, mostly because of security plugins and hosting providers. So I changed my approach.

No the plugin doesn’t override the Site icon yet. I didn’t know WP was also using this icon that way… I definitely need to hurry! Thanks for reporting!

Thanks for explaining some more ??

What you can do to test your site is to fire https://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico with your browser.

I already know this exists, since I’ve placed the file in my root directory, so I would have to remove it to test. Perhaps eventually, if I get curious enough, I will! ??

No the plugin doesn’t override the Site icon yet.

I haven’t got one enabled, as per your instructions here… Do you mean that you’re going to try to make it so that both can be used at the same time? What would be the advantage (or disadvantage) to that?

I didn’t know WP was also using this icon that way… I definitely need to hurry! Thanks for reporting!

No problem ?? So far, this is the only thing, as far as I can tell, that the plugin doesn’t do that the default WP Site Icon does do. And you mentioned something about Customizer integration in that other thread. But like I said, I’ve disabled embeds, and the Customizer as well, so those aren’t issues for me.

My only real issue was the icon in the RSS feed browser tab. From your explanation about the rewrite API, it seems like the plugin would solve this for some users, but not all. I wonder if there’s a way for the plugin to detect for which users it’s not working, instead of failing silently, and provide a notice to manually place the file in the root directory. However, maybe I’m wondering too much since it sounds like you might be going another route altogether:

The planned solution is to replace the recent “Site icon” feature of WP, which includes a dedicated RSS icon.

Either way, this issue is resolved for me. Thanks for all the thought and work you’re putting into this! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the next plugin version ??