Goodbye, Dashicons

The icons that have displayed WordPress since version 3.8 appear set to disappear in WordPress 7.2, where they’ll be replaced with vector graphics. Remember that you can listen this program from: Program transcript Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community. In this episode, you’ll find the information from August 31 to September 6, 2026. There’s now a schedule for the first maintenance release of the current version: WordPress 7.1.1 arrives September 17. The team itself acknowledges that the volume and severity of reports received in forums, Trac, and the Gutenberg repository since 7.1’s launch justify preparing this maintenance release with more advance notice than usual. As is standard for these releases, 7.1.1 focuses exclusively on bug fixes: only tickets that are regressions introduced during the 7.1 cycle itself or features deliberately postponed to the end of that cycle get in — no new features. Gutenberg 23.9 is also available, focused mainly on small day-to-day editing conveniences. You no longer have to hunt for the insert block button when it’s hidden: you can now add directly from the block’s own toolbar, so adding another image to a gallery or a new block inside a group no longer forces you to change selection or scroll to find it. Global Styles, for their part, gain a small indicator dot on each block that has a custom style override, with the option to filter and see at once only the blocks you’ve touched by hand, instead of having to review them one by one. Among the other updates, independent horizontal and vertical spacing between elements stands out for the Group block with flexible or grid layout, the ability to customize form label styling from theme.json, and Global Styles support for blockquotes, input fields, and dropdowns. You can also add your own duotone color palette from the Global Styles panel itself, instead of relying only on those the theme offers. The rest are internal improvements for accessibility and performance, including noticeably faster block selection in long posts. There’s a patch underway that replaces the Dashicons in the admin bar and sidebar menu with the new WordPress SVG icons, leveraging the new function that arrived with 7.1. The reason isn’t just aesthetic: icon fonts like Dashicons have several underlying problems. Screen readers announce them unpredictably, since they occupy Unicode code points with no defined meaning and sometimes read as a meaningless character in the middle of a sentence; they break with Windows high contrast mode and other forced color settings, because the system treats them as text; and when the font file fails to load or loads slowly, the result is boxes or strange symbols that look like a broken site, while an SVG simply doesn’t display if it fails. The change is very visible to the user, so the team is explicitly requesting more feedback than it’s gotten so far on the ticket. A couple of details remain open: the search icon ends up facing the opposite direction from the Dashicon it replaces, and the Posts icon might stop being a pushpin in favor of a pen, though there’s already debate over which fits better. Dashicons first appeared in WordPress 3.8 Parker, released December 12, 2013. They arrived alongside the admin redesign — the MP6 project — replacing the old icon sprites with a vector icon font, sharper at any resolution. The initial version included 167 icons; in WordPress 3.9 another 30 were added, reaching 197. A group of contributors held an informal talk at WordCamp US, under Chatham House rules, about WordPress’s relationship with the PHP language and its community. The underlying diagnosis is well known: much of the PHP community doesn’t consider WordPress developers “real” PHP developers, partly because WordPress’s backward compatibility commitment is perceived as slowing PHP’s own evolution, and WordPress barely participates in discussions where new PHP features are decided. That same long compatibility window creates real friction in the plugin ecosystem, whose external dependencies no longer always support PHP versions as old as the ones WordPress still admits. The data that weighs most heavily is adoption: PHP 7.4 still runs on roughly 18% of websites, with little recent incentive to update beyond security, since those old versions no longer receive patches. There was talk of pushing from the hosting side with a coordinated upgrade, of making PHP 8.x noticeably faster so speed becomes the weighty argument, and underlying concern about PHP 9: if it brings major syntax changes, it could become impossible to maintain a single WordPress version compatible with both PHP 7.4 and PHP 9. The rest of the talk revolved around tightening ties with the PHP project: resuming the conversation about WebAssembly, which was once dismissed due to lack of interest but now makes more sense given WordPress’s existing use of WASM in Playground; bringing WordPress’s HTML API work to PHP, rather than keeping it internal only; and the idea — still at wish-list level — that plugins with unsafe dependencies could be loaded with restricted permissions, marking as untrusted any code depending on them. As concrete follow-up, there’s talk of reviewing whether the distribution of old WordPress versions itself has changed, and exploring sending automatic warnings to plugin developers when their code isn’t compatible with a given PHP version. The Code Reference debuts truly executable code examples, powered by WordPress Playground: WordPress 7.1 already includes the first two, with more planned for 7.2. On reference pages there’s now a “Run” button that executes the code snippet directly in the browser, without leaving the documentation or setting up anything locally. These interactive snippets are defined directly in each method’s DocBlock, within WordPress code itself, with syntax slightly different from a normal code example. The team promises to publish soon a handbook page with all the details for anyone wanting to document their own functions with this same format. It’s time to update forums with bbPress because version 2.6.15 fixes five security flaws and several compatibility improvements. The patches strengthen permissions when editing topics and replies, splitting or merging topics, updating user profiles, and viewing private or hidden forums; password verification for imports from other systems is also hardened and PHP warnings are fixed in some forum requests. One of the flaws has its own CVE. And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org. Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!