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?

 

[bzcomputers]

It would be nice to be able to use the new x-twitter font-awesome icon () without a lot of hassle. I would assume a lot of sites like me are still using the old one.

Font-awesome just make it easier with coloring, resizing, etc., it's not simple to add in an external image (.svg or other) and get it to look the same as existing font awesome icons within the site if custom attributes have been applied..

 

[EchoRomeo]

But loosely speaking I’d expect it would involve replacing the existing web fonts we ship, the existing Less variables we ship and the existing CSS that we ship.

This isn’t really something we can support you with other than directing you towards the existing code and files that make FA5 work and tell you that it’s those that hold the clues, along with the FA6 documentation, that would perhaps enable you to retrofit FA6 in place of FA5.

Thanks Chris, really appreciate the info! It sounds like FA6 compatibility really depends on add-on developers taking the initiative to create code that bridges the gap between subscribing to FA Pro and getting access in XF. Have any add-on developers considered making such an add-on (e.g., @Kirby)?

To put it another way, we cannot ever guarantee we’ll use anything other than FA5 for the foreseeable future and, personally, I’m very happy with that. It’s a good set of icons that is incredibly comprehensive and should be capable of meeting our needs for years to come.

I agree, FA5 is very comprehensive and I'm happy with it too. But I think you'll agree that everyone's use case is different and there are sites that could benefit from having access to FA6's additional ~12,000 icons. If you use a large variety of graphics/icons on your site, then it makes sense that upgrading to FA6 would be desirable. Like a lot of features available on XF, FA6 probably isn't needed by the majority of users but could provide substantial benefit to the minority that apply FA more heavily.

 

[Forsaken]

The short answer is: we don’t know what’s involved.

We haven’t explored FA6 as it’s not currently viable for us to provide due to there not being an appropriate license that would allow it to ship with XF.

But loosely speaking I’d expect it would involve replacing the existing web fonts we ship, the existing Less variables we ship and the existing CSS that we ship.

This isn’t really something we can support you with other than directing you towards the existing code and files that make FA5 work and tell you that it’s those that hold the clues, along with the FA6 documentation, that would perhaps enable you to retrofit FA6 in place of FA5.

All I would say is that 2.3 almost certainly will change the approach you need to take, so weigh up carefully whether it’s something that’s worthwhile investing time in now.

To put it another way, we cannot ever guarantee we’ll use anything other than FA5 for the foreseeable future and, personally, I’m very happy with that. It’s a good set of icons that is incredibly comprehensive and should be capable of meeting our needs for years to come.

I would love to see XenForo support Iconify by @Arty (or take their own similar approach).

 

[Chris D]

View attachment 291150

It’s not something we have consciously tried to do. But, potentially. I’ll ping @Jeremy P to comment vaguely on that if he wants to as he has worked on FA improvements for 2.3. I figure maybe it’s somewhat shimmable more easily than currently but I’m not 100% certain.

BTW, I’ve contacted the team at FA pretty much annually for the last couple of years to see if we can figure out terms for FA6 but it’s sadly not something they seem enthusiastic about currently.

 

[Jeremy P]

I think it should be straightforward to swap existing icons with their FA6 versions in 2.3, though as @Chris D notes this is mostly a consequence of other changes and not an explicit design decision. Using the new thin or sharp icon styles is not supported out of the box. I believe adding and using new FA6 icons to the existing styles should also work okay, but I have not tested to be sure.

 

[Empty]

Reviving this thread... So I understand that if you subscribe to Font Awesome Pro you get all the Pro icons. Could someone explain how, if you do subscribe, you actually go about integrating with XenForo? Would you have to modify the font_awesome_setup template or something? Is there a setting in the ACP that lets you load stuff like that in?

Font Awesome Pro is $99. Like everyone else I'm reticent to pay that for just icons...

View attachment 291111

It mentions, though, that the Pro membership gives you five licenses for $99...I'd probably be willing to pay $20 for one license. Is this something that people can pool resources for (e.g., someone buys it and I send them $20 to get access for a year)? Excuse my ignorance, just thinking out loud about whether something like that might be workable...

I did this on my website, they do provide tutorials upon purchase for how to implement. Was relatively simple but I can't recall exactly. I also never renewed, and haven't lost any access to the icons. It was honestly worth it for a one time purchase, for me and my projects, but I think most would be better off getting icons elsewhere by other means. Does not integrate with any add-ons or icon selectors, so it's only useful if you are willing to hard code in the icons via css/html.

To see the ability for those with an FA6 license to be able to more smoothly integrate FA6 into Xenforo would be amazing. I understand this is a limited group though.

 

[Recep Baltaş]

Any update on that?

 

[stromb0li]

+1 I don't recall seeing FA 6 as a change in 2.3; any chance this will be sneaked in? v5 -> v6 exposes a little over 400 new icons to choose from

 

[Chris D]

It has been fairly extensively explain elsewhere but, essentially, we do not have a license for FA6 Pro and there isn't a license that fits our usage. We are attempting to resolve this with the FA team but there hasn't been any progress to report, yet.

 

[stromb0li]

Interesting -- I was thinking brining FA6 free tier not even pro, weird they wouldn't qualify this as part of that as well.

 

[Wing]

Interesting -- I was thinking brining FA6 free tier not even pro, weird they wouldn't qualify this as part of that as well.

Maybe reach out to Fontawesome about it, and let us know what their response is

 

[Stuart Wright]

Maybe reach out to Fontawesome about it, and let us know what their response is

We are attempting to resolve this with the FA team but there hasn't been any progress to report, yet.

@stromb0li @Wing XF 2.3 might make things easier for us.

 

[KSA]

any update to this?

 

[Martyn]

Does it have to be FA? what about MDI? or any of the others, if a company isn't willing to work with you, don't stay loyal to them, its their loss at the end of the day.

 

[Chris D]

any update to this?

I think people need to prepare themselves for the possibility that we may never officially ship with Font Awesome 6.

I have been pushing for this for a while behind the scenes. There has been a lack of communication but I'm not sure if the person I'm trying to get hold of is currently working or they're not public facing as much as they once were.

I've tried to contact some other people and it seems like the official line is that for an appropriate FA6 Pro license, at minimum we'd need to purchase 1 license seat per XF license. A license seat costs $10 annually.

$10 is pretty cheap but the costs get pretty out of hand at that kind of volume. It's also potentially a tricky metric to base it upon. I think technically it would have to be $10 per admin that has the ability to modify the styles. You've then of course got the churn of licenses changing hands, should we pay for licenses that are no longer actually installed, what about locally hosted licenses people use for development etc.

When you consider we paid $620 for FA5 Pro in 2016 and haven't had to pay a penny since, it's not looking like a good value proposition right now.

So the likely future options are:

• We stick with FA5 Pro forever
• We revert back to a free license with FA6 Free
• Ditch FA entirely

My preference would be to keep FA in some form. In either of those cases, our focus would be making it easier for people with a FA6 Pro license to utilise their own license.

Anyway, once we know anything significant, we'll make sure you guys know. Just don't expect anything exciting to happen soon. Any significant changes would be in XF 3.0 at the earliest.

 

[Martyn]

• We revert back to a free license with FA6 Free
• Ditch FA entirely

can this not be both? apply for the free license, with an option for a "license" people can enter if they wish to use it, or simple enough to keep the free one going,

or maybe support one of the other ones as well? how hard would it be to change all code to fa-- to mdi-- ? assuming they have the same names maybe.

 

[stromb0li]

I wouldn't be opposed to having Font-Awesome Pro as an official solution/add-on to XenForo for an extra $5 or $10.

Alternatively, didn't know MDI existed; looks promising as an alternative if the ditch approach was taken. I think the bummer though is xf:fa would become deprecated and that's a whole poop load of icon references to update.

 

[bzcomputers]

I've tried to contact some other people and it seems like the official line is that for an appropriate FA6 Pro license, at minimum we'd need to purchase 1 license seat per XF license. A license seat costs $10 annually.

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

I think if you offered an option for a Font Awesome Pro License per XenForo License for $10 annually, I think many would pay for the upgrade without hesitation.

Then a decent fallback would be to use the FA6 free option. The trick would be when a FA6 license ends and isn't renewed what happens to the FA Pro icon links?

 

[RobinHood]

My preference would be to keep FA in some form. In either of those cases, our focus would be making it easier for people with a FA6 Pro license to utilise their own license.

This whole thing isn't that surprising, but the lack of comms from them is bad form.

It would be optimal of them to offer a volume fixed price to lock in the 6.x branch, even if it's significantly more than the last deal. But a heavily discounted price per XF licence is also understandable.

$10 per admin that has the ability to modify the styles

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. In which case I'd almost expect sub $10 at your scale tbh, especially if it's tied to a single domain.

In the wordpress ecosystem there's tons of themes and packages that include licences to multiple premium plugins that standalone would cost $50 per year, and the theme cost itself is only a fraction more than that, and that cost is not recurring.

That results in a single $70 theme coming with hundreds of dollars of licences for value added plugins in perpetuity. I think this has been of great benefit to the plugin devs that have opted to do this, as it's greatly increased their reach and I've now had to purchase multiple full price licences of those plugins for other projects because I've enjoyed using them and seen the value of them when the were included with that theme.

In the end if it all falls through though, it would be nice to have the ability for that that have our own FA licence to just upload the SVGs or font, dump them in a folder and have them be usable and searchable in the back end.

Or the ability to have a drop in replacement for an open source alternative, or even upload your own svg icons, there's still a lot of free icons on the font awesome site available for download as SVG.

 

[Andy.N]

Hopefully, this will open the potential for XF to allow admin to use their own SVG icons.