For many years, the Dashicons project has supplied many of the icons in WordPress and it’s become widely used by plugins. The icon font is currently sitting at an impressive 303 icons!
We’ve recently discussed how to best move forward with icons in WordPress. The block editor uses SVG icons directly, and the rest of WordPress uses the Dahsicons icon font. One of the challenges with an icon font is that it’s one big compiled “sprite”, and so even though it gets cached well, for every icon you add the sprite grows bigger. With SVG you include just the icons you need. The block editor does this using a new Icon component.
In an effort to move things forward, and per discussion in the core design chat (link requires registration), it was suggested that an ultimate release of Dashicons be made, to wrap up existing requests (adding 36 new icons), close down to new requests, and to focus future efforts on the new Icon component.
With that plan, the next steps are:
- Create a Trac ticket for bringing the updated Dashicons icon font to WordPress 5.5.
- Close all open tickets and PRs in the Dashicons repository, and close to new requests.
- Close the Dashicons resource website to new requests.
Future efforts for the new Icon component, including creating new documentation and improving the build process will be discussed in the Gutenberg repository.