XF 2.2 When will we get FontAwesome 6 support?

[Stuart Wright]

Fontawesome 6 has some useful icons and I’d like to use one of them (slider-flip).
But there are some changes.

<i class="far fa-alarm-clock"></i>

in FA5 vs

<i class="fa-regular fa-alarm-clock"></i>

in 6.

Is FA6 support in the pipeline?

 

[Suzanne O]

What you could do is put the $10 payment as a seperate thing if you want FA6 pro.
Ditch fa5
Go with fa6 pro for the developers
Fa6 free for everyone else.

 

[Kirby]

Certainly a lot cheaper than the $99 Pro license we'd have to pay annually outside of XenForo.

Certainly a lot more expensive than a $ 99 Pro license if you have way > 10 XenForo licenses but < 5 people working with FA icons.

That seems a little odd. It should just be tie to the domain of the XF install, not a specific user. That would actually be far more restrictive than the core FA licence, where you can use it on as many domains as you like.

Really?

A standard FA 6 Pro license costs $ 20 / seat / year (if exceeding the 5 included seats)

What you could do is put the $10 payment as a seperate thing if you want FA6 pro.
Ditch fa5
Go with fa6 pro for the developers
Fa6 free for everyone else.

I don't think this would be a good idea:

If the availibility of Pro icons is only an option, developers and designers would have to stick to Free icons anyway (which is somewhat limiting) or state that customers must also have the "XenForo FA 6 Pro License Option".

The latter option woud most likely distract / annoy potential customers and I'd image this to be a support nightmare ("Why doesn't this work?").

So from my point of view the only realistic options (short of getting a deal with Fonticons, Inc. that would work well for XenForo usecase) would be

• Stick with FA5 forever
• Offer FA 6 usage via customer FA 6 Pro license or by paying an extra per XenForo license (XenForo customers must choose one of those options per XenForo license)
  For XenForo customers with multiple instances getting their own FA 6 Pro license could be a lot cheaper than paying +10 $ / XenForo license
• Switch icon set

Side Note:
AFAIK XenForo currently uses 4 commercially licensed components - Froala, Font Awesome Pro, Fancybox & Lightgallery.
50% of them are causing issues / headaches, maybe this does tell smth.

 

[Suzanne O]

Certainly a lot more expensive than a $ 99 Pro license if you have way > 10 XenForo licenses but < 5 people working with FA icons.


Really?

A standard FA 6 Pro license costs $ 20 / seat /year (if exceeding the 5 included seats)

View attachment 297557


I don't think this would be a good idea:

If the availibility of Pro icons is only an option, developers and designers would have to stick to Free icons anyway (which is somewhat limiting) or state that customers must also have the "XenForo FA 6 Pro License Option".

The latter option woud most likely distract / annoy potential customers and I'd image this to be a support nightmare ("Why doesn't this work?").

So from my point of view the only realistic options (short of getting a deal with Fonticons, Inc. that would work well for XenForo usecase) would be

• Stick with FA5 forever
• Offer FA 6 usage via customer FA 6 Pro license or by paying an extra per XenForo license (XenForo customers must choose one of those options per XenForo license)
  For XenForo customers with multiple instances getting their own FA 6 Pro license could be a lot cheaper than paying +10 $ / XenForo license
• Switch icon set

Side Note:
AFAIK XenForo currently uses 4 commercially licensed components - Froala, Font Awesome Pro, Fancybox & Lightgallery.
50% of them are causing issues / headaches, maybe this does tell smth.

It's just an idea dude.
Especially if people like @Russ who designs themes for xf users
And if people like @Chris D wish to move things up a gear with the updates. It might be something there.

 

[stromb0li]

I don't think this would be a good idea:

If the availibility of Pro icons is only an option, developers and designers would have to stick to Free icons anyway (which is somewhat limiting) or state that customers must also have the "XenForo FA 6 Pro License Option".

The latter option woud most likely distract / annoy potential customers and I'd image this to be a support nightmare ("Why doesn't this work?").

So from my point of view the only realistic options (short of getting a deal with Fonticons, Inc. that would work well for XenForo usecase) would be

• Stick with FA5 forever
• Offer FA 6 usage via customer FA 6 Pro license or by paying an extra per XenForo license (XenForo customers must choose one of those options per XenForo license)
  For XenForo customers with multiple instances getting their own FA 6 Pro license could be a lot cheaper than paying +10 $ / XenForo license
• Switch icon set

Side Note:
AFAIK XenForo currently uses 4 commercially licensed components - Froala, Font Awesome Pro, Fancybox & Lightgallery.
50% of them are causing issues / headaches, maybe this does tell smth

It's always easy to offer a solution vs implement, but this is my take.

Consider aliasing xf:icon to xf:fa in 2.3. In 3.0, breaking change eliminate xf:fa, which would eliminate font-awesome branding within xf codebase.

In 3.0, leverage an open source project, such as Pictogrammer's MDI set. Set aside the budget for font-awesome to an artist to contribute any icons used by xenforo that may be missing (which I would assume is low, given MDI does have thousands of icons already available).

Then in the future, if MDI set wasn't the right decision, at least xf:icon is generic enough to potentially allow less of a hit / more flexibility in switching between iconography providers (if that's the right word) down the road.

Transparency: even if XF switched to MDI, there are a few icons that I'd miss, but if that solves licensing headaches for XF and enables flexibility to potentially leverage newer techniques even outside of font-awesome down the road; I wouldn't be an upset customer.

 

[z3r010]

As long as the free version of FA6 allows a compact delivery, then I am happy with that, and I can change out anything that was pro.

 

[Jeremy P]

Speaking unofficially here, and I understand everyone's needs are different and the situation is likely to evolve over time, but I can't say I've found FA6 or another icon set to be an extremely pressing need at present. Accounting for variants, many (but certainly not all) of the new icons seem a bit niche for typical usage.

 

[stromb0li]

Speaking unofficially here, and I understand everyone's needs are different and the situation is likely to evolve over time, but I can't say I've found FA6 or another icon set to be an extremely pressing need at present. Accounting for variants, many (but certainly not all) of the new icons seem a bit niche for typical usage.

If you can negotiate FontAwesome adding a golf cart icon and backport it into v5; scratch all my previous comments

Me @FA

 

[beerForo]

Ran into needing one also before I knew it was limited to v5 max.

 

[beerForo]

@Jeremy P opened a can of worms

 

[bzcomputers]

Pretty sure "x-twitter" has sold a lot of Font Awesome 6 upgrades.

 

[Jeremy P]

@Jeremy P opened a can of worms

Certainly open to hearing about others' uses, just speaking more to my personal experience/perspective.

Pretty sure "x-twitter" has sold a lot of Font Awesome 6 upgrades.

I'm sure, though we actually already ship the FA6 free icon for Twitter in XF 2.2.14+ as a one-off (usable with {{ x_logo() }} in templates).

 

[Paul B]

many (but certainly not all) of the new icons seem a bit niche for typical usage.

Are you kidding?

I've lost count of the number of times I've needed a tarp droplet, t-rex, and soft-serve icon.

Totally destroyed the plan I had to launch a new dinosaurs wrestling in ice cream forum.

 

[Jeremy P]

I'd also note it's not too complicated to just inline one-off SVG icons where it makes sense to do so. The changes made for 2.3 do make the icon system more amenable to future changes/drop ins too, though it's still geared around FA5 for the time being.

 

[Forsaken]

Being a broken record... Iconify .

It gives people choices in what icons they use, and allows them to switch when they want.

 

[Martyn]

go with the open source projects. support them.

 

[RobinHood]

For anyone interested, Web Awesome is being Kickstarted at the moment (Web Components), however one of the pledges they have is for a 12 month Font Awesome Pro subscription, which is a 31% discount off the usual $99 per year.



They also have a combined Web Awesome plus Font Awesome 12 month sub for $149



They're also planning to make a rich text editor as an $800k stretch goal, which will certainly be an interesting challenge for them!