Selective Icons

For anyone wanting to achieve something like I described above at any cost, you can use another plugin instead of this one to achieve a local selective loading of Font Awesome icons (and other providers’ icons) using a Custom setup with this plugin:

WP SVG Icons

Easier than you’d think. You create a custom icon pack at IcoMoon and then import its ZIP to the plugin and boom.

@harryfear yes, the idea of subsetting icons (load only some icons, ideally just the ones you actually use) is an important performance feature for many users. We do have several ways to achieve subsetting. However, the current state of this plugin is intentionally very simple. Our current statistics indicate that, most often, even though we offer various ways to subset icons, sites end up loading all.css or all.js anyway. Probably because it’s easiest.

My hope, though, is to see enough demand from plugin users like yourself to justify the feature priority to add subsetting to this plugin as well. So, your vote in that direction is valuable.

Bear in mind that this is an issue of performance, and there may be a significant tradeoff between size and speed here. If you subset your own icons and load them via self-hosting from your own WordPress server, I wonder if you’ll see them load as fast as loading all of them from our CDN, which is what this plugin uses to load icons.

Here’s something else to keep your eye on, very exciting–I waited to respond to this until our release today (!)–but we’ve just released Font Awesome Kits. Our Pro Kits do subsetting automatically while also loading from a CDN. So it’s the best of both worlds performance-wise, while eliminating the need for that extra configuration and build step of creating your own font subset bundle.

I’m working on changes to this plugin now to prepare it for compatibility with the Kits feature. Once that becomes available, I think it will be the easy-win choice for easy, high-performance subsetting.

Awesome, thanks!

When will the update be done for the kits?

Allso another feature request:
Have the ability to have an button in the WYSIWYG to add an shortcode with some options.
We are using ACF extensivly, hope you have something for this ??

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a definite schedule for the kits feature to come to this plugin. I can say that an intermediate step is to overhaul how the plugin works under the hood, which will make it ready for kits. I’m nearly done with that work, which you can follow on this pull request, if you like.

I’m curious about your feature request. I’ve done some initial work to explore how to bring a WYSIWYG experience into the Gutenberg editor (now just the default editor for WP 5.x). Is that where you’d be most interested in seeing this? Or are you hoping for something that would integrate with the classic editor? Or something else?

It shoud be something like this:
https://ps.w.org/better-font-awesome/assets/screenshot-1.gif?rev=1179314

This way my clients can add icons easily themselves.

Don’t how this should work on Gutenberg, we don’t use it at all. We only use ACF Pro

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by R3dRidl3.

Yeah, the previous plugin that lived in this namespace had an icon selector like that one shown in the linked gif. Its implementation was so far out of date, though, and it was only for the classic (tinyMCE) editor, that I dropped it early on, planning to revisit that feature later when the value and priority became more clear.

This conversation helps to re-assess that priority, so thanks for raising it.

The Gutenberg approach would be very different from the tinyMCE approach, so different that it would really be two different features, and would need to be prioritized accordingly.

Another factor that comes to mind: an icon selector like that seems to assume that what you want to insert is just a static glyph, as if from a webfont file. Which was the only paradigm in the pre-Font Awesome 5 days. Now with our SVG/JS technology, and advanced features like Power Transforms, Stacking, Layering, Masking, it deserves considering whether a simple “icon selector” would provide adequate access to the Font Awesome feature set.

My guess is that 80% of the time, or more, a user still just wants to select a single basic icon like that. But still, every time we implement something like this, I want to have our whole feature set in mind and at least imagine the roadmap toward supporting the full feature set over time.

In any case, feature priorities can be re-balanced by the interests of the community. This plugin is, after all, an open source project. So contributions are welcome.