Make dashicons available for site icon

[siobhan]

The new site icon feature is sweet. However, many people don't have the capability to create a site icon that'll look nice on a browser tab. If they upload a photo it looks all squished up and doesn't convey anything.

Since Dashicons are available in WordPress already, what about making some of them available for users to select from that they can use as their site icon? At least if we give them some options they'll end up with something that looks decent alongside all of the other browser icons.

This could be a small UI panel that gives the user and option to select a dashicon or upload their own icon. It would also visually indicate that what is expected is a simple icon, not a photograph or something more complex.

[melchoyce]

If we do this, let's hold off until Dashicons are SVG in core, rather than an icon font.

[melchoyce]

FWIW, I think this is more plugin territory.

[johnjamesjacoby]

I think this is a really neat idea.

I have a hunch it would take a bit of inventing to create an interface for turning the output of an icon-font back into a rasterized image, but most environments that WordPress would be installed in should have the server-side libraries necessary to pull this off.

If this goes the plugin route, it doesn't just need to be Dashicons; it could be any icon-font with primitive background color support, cropping, rotation, etc... Something like this would be neat as an avatar customizer, too.

[celloexpressions]

I agree this is probably plugin territory. I'm also not sure that dashicons would make sense, something like genericons would probably be more appropriate to expose to users in this way.

[karmatosed]

I would also consider this plugin not core territory. I also feel dashicons doesn't make that much sense compared to other options. We're opening up icons that have a set meaning in the WP universe to suddenly mean something else. A little confusing unfortunately for users.

[celloexpressions]

I'm going to close this for now based on lack of movement/interest and the plugin territory notes above.

There is definitely a need for a good built-in library of site icons, so users can pick something more specific than the WordPress logo without needing a custom icon. There's opportunity for plugins to fill this need and core may circle back to working on this in the future. That will likely be a bigger project and probably won't use Dashicons. Ideally there could be something like an open icon library along the lines of the block pattern directory.