New Features in WoltLab Suite 6.0: Font Awesome 6

Font Awesome, the popular icon toolkit, has come a long way since its inception. With each new version, it has continued to enhance the way developers and designers incorporate icons into their projects. Font Awesome 6, the latest iteration, brings a host of advantages and improvements over its predecessor, Font Awesome 4. In this article, we’ll dive into the advancements of Font Awesome 6 and explore how it surpasses the functionality and usability of Font Awesome 4.

Expanded Icon Library

One of the significant advantages of Font Awesome 6 is its expanded icon library. While Font Awesome 4 was already known for its extensive collection of icons, version 6 takes it to the next level. Font Awesome 6 introduces hundreds of new icons, including popular social media platforms, technology-related symbols, and industry-specific icons. This expanded library ensures that developers and designers have a vast array of options to choose from, making it easier to find the perfect icon for their needs.

Enhanced Usability

With Font Awesome 6, the icons have been fundamentally revised to create a unified look. One common issue of the icons in earlier revisions was their inconsistent placement, causing some icons to be rendered with an offset. This has finally been addressed by centering all icons around the center point. In addition, the icons are significantly sharper than in previous Font Awesome versions which provides a much better experience especially on HD/1080p and similar screens.

Modular Architecture

Font Awesome 6 consists of multiple icon sets that are bundled into separate fonts that can be loaded independently. The growing number of icons inevitably results in larger file sizes and especially in case of brand icons can be a huge waste of bandwidth and thus load times. We’re taking advantage of the segmented icons and only include the default icon set automatically while brand icons are embedded separately on demand. This allows us to provide many times more icons than previously without growing the size of the icon font significantly in comparison.

Using Font Awesome Pro

Besides the free version of Font Awesome 6, which is used by default in WoltLab Suite 6.0, there is also the Pro version. It offers even more icons and more variations of the icons of the free version.

When integrating the icons, we made sure that it is possible to switch to the Pro version of the icons with a few simple steps, provided that a corresponding license has been purchased for it. The implementation of icons will automatically adapt to the icon set being in use without requiring developers to make any adjustments to their code.

Conclusion

Font Awesome 6 represents a significant leap forward from the previous used version, Font Awesome 4. We skipped version 5 because it provided only mediocre benefits while causing a lot of compatibility issues we were not happy with. Version 6 is a huge step forwards and we took to opportunity to overhaul the entire icon handling to make for a better experience for users and developers alike. During development we spent a considerate amount of time to improve the interaction with icons and laying down the foundation for upgrades to future version of Font Awesome.