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Sarah Gooding

Font Awesome 5.2 Adds 372 New Icons, Introduces Automotive and Education Categories

image credit: Font Awesome

Font Awesome 5.2 was released yesterday with two new categories and 372 new icons, bringing the total number of free icons to 1,295. The open source vector icon font is used on more than 22 million sites across the internet. It’s also a popular icon font with WordPress theme and plugin developers.

Version 5.2 introduces automotive and education categories, which should be useful to fill the gaps for designers and developers creating sites around these subjects. The release also adds 66 new and updated icons to the Medical category and 126 new and updated Maps icons.

Font Awesome, originally created by Dave Gandy, is an SIL OFL-licensed icon font, with the code under the MIT License. Thanks to its GPL-friendly license, the icon font is widely used in WordPress’ theme and plugin ecosystem in both commercial and free products. Font Awesome’s Github issues queue is also loaded with icon requests that would be used in niche WordPress themes, as well as icons for WordPress-related company logos.

Two years ago, Font Awesome announced the beta release of its new CDN, which allows developers to implement it using a single line of code to bring the icons and CSS toolkit into their projects. At that time, Font Awesome was used by more than 300 plugins on WordPress.org. In 2018, searching the official plugin directory turns up more than 800 plugins that make use of the icon font in some way. Thousands of free and commercial themes also use it to provide users with easy customization options.

Font Awesome support for Gutenberg is going to be fairly important, as hundreds of thousands of websites are using plugins like Better Font Awesome, Font Awesome Shortcodes, and Font Awesome for Menus to allow users to add icons to content and menus. Currently there are no Gutenberg-compatible plugins for adding Font Awesome icons to content.

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7 responses to “Font Awesome 5.2 Adds 372 New Icons, Introduces Automotive and Education Categories”

  1. Once FA in loaded in WP by plugin / theme, Gutenberg itself can already make use of it in it’s blocks. There’s no need of Gutenberg-compatible plugin to make this enable Gutenberg to use FA.

    Are you perhaps referring to the lack of a discrete Icon Picker block?

    Create forum topic from comment

    • Why an Icon Picker Block?
      What if I want an Icon just also within my text paragraph?

      This needs to be better thought out if someone makes in integration.

      I DON’T want 587 plugins of blocks for every “little” thing under the sun. Another thing where “Gutenberg” fails a lot.

      And if I want to add something custom on my own to add to the (current) Editor?
      Currently that is easy with a few lines of (mostly PHP) code. However, with “Gutenberg” I have to study Javascript and implement a build process for all this crap. Or alternatively install dozens of plugins where I don’t know how good the (JS) code is.

      Create forum topic from comment

    • There kind of is. You have at least 3 options:

      1.) https://fortawesome.com/ – product by the creator of font awesome, lets you select which icons you want to use and it outputs the only the css and fonts you selected to use. Significantly decreases file sizes.

      2.) If using a javascript framework and build process (like webpack), you can import only the icons you plan to use, which will decrease the size of the compiled project in the end.

      3.) You could also just pull SVG’s you need from the package and use them inline, without including the entire css/font libraries.

      Create forum topic from comment

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