[Resolved] Font Awesome plugin support

[Steven]

I was looking in to additional Font Awesome icon support for the Kadence Blocks plugin. I came across something I thought I’d pass along in case it might make supporting Font Awesome easier into the future. When I searched on GP and FA, I found the following article:

https://docs.generatepress.com/article/font-awesome/

I’m not super clear on how Generate Press is using Font Awesome icons at this point. However, I installed the Font Awesome plugin. On its status page, it seems to detect GP as an “unregistered” client loading FA resources. Here’s the content on that plugin page in case there’s any action GP may want to take to update the theme (see last line of the text below for a reference to GP):

Client Requirements
We don’t detect any other active clients (like themes or plugins) that have registered requirements for Font Awesome.

Unregistered Clients
These are plugins or themes we’ve detected that appear to be trying to load their own versions of Font Awesome. Loading more than one version of Font Awesome will almost certainly result in problems, eventually. So, even if all registered clients are satisfied with your configuration, they can be broken by an unexpected version of Font Awesome loaded by one of these unregistered clients.

We recommend enabling the Remove unregistered clients option to avoid such conflicts. When enabled, our plugin will attempt to stop these other clients from loading their own versions of Font Awesome. Most likely, they will continue to operate normally, as long as they are compatible with the version configured here.

If you enable Remove unregistered clients and the results produced by those unregistered clients aren’t what you expect (for example, their icons are missing), then you could try to select different options here, trying to find a configuration that is compatible with them. Since they are unregistered clients, we don’t know what their requirements are, so you kinda just have to guess. You’ll know you’ve found a workable configuration when all of the registered clients are satisfied (no conflicts shown here), and the unregistered clients produce expected results (their icons look right to you).

A couple other options for resolving problems with unregistered clients:

Deactivate or replace it, if possible.
Contact the developer for the unregistered client and ask them to consider updating their code to register with this Font Awesome Official plugin. Let them know they can reach us at hello@fontawesome.com.

Name Type Loading

font-awesome style https://cityofbellingh.wpengine.com/wp-content/themes/generatepress/css/font-awesome.min.css

[Steven]

The plugin referenced in the GP article has a lot of active installations, but hasn’t been updated in over a year. Maybe it’s still being recommended for backward compatibility, but thought I’d mention it.

[Leo]

Hi there,

I’m not super clear on how Generate Press is using Font Awesome icons at this point.

GP doesn’t load FA at all currently so it is up to the user to install third party plugin to load it when it’s needed

Keep in mind that some other plugins will also load it for you automatically (like Elementor I believe) so that might be where the warning is coming from – you could disable all active plugins except GP Premium to test this.

Let me know if this helps 🙂

[Steven]

The warning references: https://cityofbellingh.wpengine.com/wp-content/themes/generatepress/css/font-awesome.min.css which seems to indicate GP is using FA in someway – at least historically if not currently.

[Leo]

GP used to use FA but it has been removed since theme version 2.1 which was released in May last year:
https://generatepress.com/generatepress-2-1/
https://docs.generatepress.com/article/load-essentials-icons/

Do you still see any FA settings in Customizer > General?

[Steven]

When I go to Appearance > GeneratePress it shows:

GeneratePress 2.3.2
GP Premium 1.8.3

If GP isn’t using FA anymore, then maybe this is just a bit of housekeeping to clean out that CSS file in the next version to avoid it being detected by the FA plugin.

[Leo]

I believe that’s still needed for backward compatibility – always tough to give people something then take it away after.

Will ask Tom to confirm 🙂

[Tom]

If it’s loading that file, it means you need to go to Customize > General to check the “Load essential icons only” option.

Checking this option will make it disappear (once you save), and GP will never load Font Awesome again.

[Steven]

Thanks Tom and Leo – selecting that resulted in the FA plugin no longer detecting that CSS file.

[Tom]

Awesome 🙂

[Author]

Posts