nikosdion/notawesome

A Joomla! 5 Cassiopeia child template which can automatically unload FontAwesome, but **ONLY** when it's not needed.

NotAwesome

A Joomla! 5 Cassiopeia child template which can automatically unload FontAwesome, but ONLY when it's not needed.

This is my reply to the bad advice given in https://web-eau.net/en/blog/remove-font-awesome-from-joomla-template.

In that article, Daniel says that you can unload FontAwesome by pointing its URI in the WebAssetManager to a blank string. However, this is wrong! It assumes you have no third party extensions which depend on FontAwesome. If you do, they ask Joomla! to load FontAwesome, nothing is loaded, and now we have all sorts of display and possibly JavaScript issues.

What I am demonstrating in this repository is that you can do that conditionally. You can tell Joomla! to remove the FontAwesome dependency as long as nothing other than the Cassiopeia template depends on it. It's not easy and requires registering event handlers from within the template, but it's nothing that you cannot abstract away to a helper class that you can reuse across all your templates, if that's something you want to do.

Note that there is exactly one case where this will fall flat on its face: if an extension developer includes FontAwesome directly, either by doing something like $wa->useStyle('fontawesome') or otherwise registering and loading the CSS file to FontAwesome directly. But, hey, this is a fringe enough use case that you will absolutely know if you run into it.

Joomla! is an extremely powerful CMS, as long as you use it right.