Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Afr Schoe
Afr Schoe

Posted on

How to strip out all emojis?

I have noticed that the entire Forem stack is basically built on a foundation of emojis. While this gives a nice brand feeling for sites such as dev.to 👩‍💻👨‍💻 or forem.dev 🌱 - some sites might want to go other ways with regards to the design.

I noticed, you can set SVG icons for the left-hand side navigation. However, I failed to find out how to replace the following emojis:

  • left navigation "Home" link (top, not part of the navigation admin panel), default icon is a "house" emoji
  • user settings left navigation (all fields)
  • the admin config "community emoji" - it does not seem to allow other symbols, e.g., unicode

Would that be easily possible to replace emojis in all places with custom symbols/graphics or should I escalate that to Github discussions?

Oldest comments (2)

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pp profile image
Paweł Ludwiczak • Edited

left navigation "Home" link

@nickytonline did a pretty hacky trick to achieve this for VSCodeTips - he used CSS to hide the default home link and then create a custom navigation item for Home where he could add own icon. (I highly recommend looking at his community with Web Inspector :))

And no, that is not the way it should be done. However, we're currently working on improving the way navigation is set up. Defining and editing links will be much easier and that also includes icons (whether you want to use emojis OR something else). Unfortunately, even though this is currently on our plate, it's hard to determine WHEN it's gonna be shipped.

user settings left navigation (all fields)

This is unfortunately not possible at the moment... Well, you can hide these icons with similar CSS hack but it would still be a hack, not a solution.

To be honest, we haven't been thinking about this part of navigation. But I think you're right - we probably shouldn't dictate usage of Emojis for this navigation. But please take this opinion with a grain of salt as this matter hasn't really been discussed internally and it's just my personal opinion. This definitely requires more thinking - i.e. if not emojis then what? nothing? alternative icon set? should we let admins customize these? if yes, wouldn't that be too granular type of customization/configurations (side effect: the more we let customize, the more we have to maintain)? So yea, definitely some work to be done here.

the admin config "community emoji" - it does not seem to allow other symbols, e.g., unicode

This, AFAIK, currently accepts only Emojis. Which is also wrong. Honestly I think we're going to drop this entirely - meaning this field will not exist and you won't be able to add anything instead. I personally think this field is a bit pointless :)

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afr profile image
Afr Schoe

Thanks for your detailled response. I was already browsing VSCodeTricks with envy 😊

I'll also look into CSS hat tricks then.