When Sitecore released version 5.0 of the CMS, it included a major overhaul of the design in the editor, which featured a set of icons purchased from an external icon design company. These PNG icons are also included in the version 6 of the CMS.
Sitecore already in version 5 decided to include the complete icon package into the software, although only a subset of the icons were used – why? Maybe as a service towards the developers or maybe just because it was easier for them just to include them all, who knows. Anyway, the complete icon library can be used – and in version 6 even browsed – from with the Sitecore editor. Nice feature – but from my point of view, at a very high price.
The following table shows the number of files, just in the /sitecore/shell/themes/standard folder for some randomly picked versions of Sitecore CMS:
Version 5.0: 11.100 files
Version 5.2.0: 13.357 files
Version 5.3.0: 13.745 files
Version 5.3.2: 18.133 files
Version 6.0: 18.244 files
Version 7.0: ??
I have about 5-10 different Sitecore projects on my hard disk which I am actively working on, I constantly create and delete Sitecore projects for testing purposes and our build system continuously and nightly surveys, builds and copies 20+ active Sitecore projects in our company. All of these tasks are heavily burdened by the icon library.
A clean Sitecore 6 version contains approx. 24.000 files of which approx. 18.000 are icons (and approx. 5.000 are related to the HTML editor). This means that 75% of the files in Sitecore are icons. In terms of megabytes, this number is only 40%. But still, you get my point?
Sitecore, please, please, please consider alternate ways of including the icon library. How about a compiled resource with all the icons? Or maybe included in the media library in the core database? Whichever way you choose, the life of me – and a lot of my fellow Sitecore developers – will be so much easier. Thank you!
