During the WordPress Community Day following WCSF, a group of us (@ryelle, @empireoflight, @michael-arestad, @liljimmi — am I missing anyone? Maybe @markjaquith was there?) got together and discussed the future of Dashicons. Here are the notes from that meeting:
Icon font, or SVG?
Pros:
- SVGs better rendered in browsers
- Easier to maintain
- The grunt process would be in core, so anyone can do it
Cons:
- Different steps of building
- Drop icon (svg) into folder, run grunt
- IE9,10,11 don’t support external svgs
- JS library fallback
- Originally this was a font due to IE8
- grunt would compile light/dark pngs
- Modernizr or hacky thing to add a class
What’s the process for the new font?
- Icons are all 1 .ai, each as a layer or artboard, exported to SVG
- Or shortcut to SVGs
- Grunt compiles a folder of SVGs to generate png, css, etc.
- Optimize SVG
- Grunticon to create pngs-> can be different colors
- Combine SVGs into sprite
- Pulled into core
How to BackCompat?
- Old fonticons would use .dashicons, new would use .dashicon
- Enqueue old font for a while
- Check JS to see if anyone’s using old font
Steps
- We already have the folder of SVGs
- Micheal going to Gruntfile
- Ben use this process for Palm Tree, Tracy bringing in things that missed 4.0
- Upload SVG to a ticket
- Stay on the 20×20 grid, for consistency
- Official guidelines and template (Mel)
- Style guide!
- Redirect to dev hub
- Blog: where we’re going, pros and cons, btw demo page.
Purpose of Dashicons?
How far are we going? Everything ever?
- No new third party icons
- Keep small as possible, things are hard to remove
- Keep focus on wordpress admin
- Approval process for icons
- Ben is best for stylistics, but whether the icon belongs is democratic
Following the meeting, we redirected the github resource to Dashicon’s new official home at developer.wordpress.org/resource/dashicons/.
Next up, we’ll want to start having meetings to get this process rolling. @ryelle has agreed to lead meetings, and has a preliminary mockup for the new process that we can talk about at our first meeting, which will take place some time during the week of the 12th-16th. What day/time works best for people?