Fixing broken action icons in the News view

Symptoms

On the news detail page (news/view-...), the action buttons below the article are broken in a custom theme:

• the comment button renders as an empty grey square (no icon at all),

• the print button shows the legacy eimages/generic/printer.png bitmap,

• the edit button (admins) shows the legacy eimages/admin_images/edit_16.png bitmap,

• the buttons carry btn btn-default btn-secondary classes that don't match the theme.

Inspecting the empty comment button reveals a dead CSS class:

<i class="glyphicon glyphicon-fa-comment"></i>

No such icon exists in any icon font — that's why nothing renders.

Root cause

There are two independent causes, and both live in the theme, not in the news plugin.

1. The BOOTSTRAP constant is not defined

Core branches on deftrue('BOOTSTRAP') in dozens of places. The news action shortcodes are among them:

• sc_adminoptions() (news shortcodes) — glyph when BOOTSTRAP is defined, edit_16.png when not,

• emailprint::render_emailprint() (behind {PRINTICON}) — glyph vs. printer.png,

• many other core handlers and templates.

If the theme never defines the constant, core silently serves the legacy (pre-Bootstrap) output everywhere.

2. No icon font is registered

Even where core does emit a glyph, it goes through e_parse::toGlyph(). Without a registered FontAwesome library, toGlyph('fa-comment') falls back to the Glyphicons prefix and produces the dead glyphicon glyphicon-fa-comment class — an icon name that exists in no font.

Defining BOOTSTRAP manually in theme.php is not enough. The parser keeps its own state (e_parse::setBootstrap() / setFontAwesome()), and that state is only set when the libraries are registered through theme.xml.

The fix

Step 1 — register the libraries in theme.xml

Add a <libraries> block to the theme's theme.xml:

<libraries>
    <library name="bootstrap" version="5" scope="front" files="none" />
    <library name="fontawesome" version="6" scope="front" files="css" />
</libraries>

What each entry does:

• bootstrap — theme_handler::loadLibrary() defines BOOTSTRAP=5 and calls e_parse::setBootstrap(5). The files attribute controls which library assets are loaded: js, css, or empty for both.

• fontawesome — defines FONTAWESOME=6, calls setFontAwesome(6) and loads the local FontAwesome 6 CSS that ships with core ({e_WEB}lib/font-awesome). From this point toGlyph() outputs working fa-* classes.

files="none" is intentional when the theme's CSS framework already bundles Bootstrap (Tabler, most compiled commercial templates do — both CSS and JS). Loading the core Bootstrap library on top of a bundled copy duplicates the JS event handlers: dropdowns open and immediately close again. With files="none" the constants and parser state are set, but no file is loaded.

Step 2 — re-save the theme and clear the cache

Library registrations are read when the theme is (re)activated, and the library detection result is cached:

1. Admin → Theme Manager → open the site theme → Save.

2. Admin → Tools → Cache → clear the system cache.

Without this step the constants will not appear even with a correct theme.xml.

Step 3 (optional) — restyle the buttons via a template override

The button classes come from the news templates, which pass a class= parameter to each shortcode. To replace the legacy btn-default look, copy the plugin templates into the theme:

e107_plugins/news/templates/news_view_template.php
        → THEME/templates/news/news_view_template.php

and change the options block, e.g. for a Tabler-based theme:

<div class="options d-print-none hidden-print">
    <div class="btn-actions">{NEWSCOMMENTLINK: class=btn btn-action}{PRINTICON: class=btn btn-action}{ADMINOPTIONS: class=btn btn-action}{SOCIALSHARE}</div>
</div>

Notes:

• A theme override replaces the plugin template file entirely — every key the plugin file defines must exist in the override (including ['default']['schema']), otherwise those parts break silently.

• {NEWSCOMMENTLINK} ignores a glyph= parameter. Its icon comes from the template parameter ['param']['commentlink'] (any HTML, e.g. an inline SVG) or defaults to toGlyph('fa-comment').

• {ADMINOPTIONS} supports a theme icon hook: if THEME/images/newsedit.png exists, it is used instead of the glyph.

• {PRINTICON} accepts class= and renders FontAwesome glyphs once BOOTSTRAP is defined.

Verification

After the fix, the comment button should render as:

<i class="fa-solid fa-comment"></i>   <!-- or similar fa-* markup -->

and the print/edit buttons should output fa-print / fa-edit glyphs instead of <img> tags pointing to eimages/.

Takeaways

• Legacy PNG icons and dead glyphicon glyphicon-fa-* classes in any core or plugin output are a theme-level symptom: check the <libraries> block first.

• BOOTSTRAP and FONTAWESOME must be set through theme.xml so both the constants and the parser state are configured.

• Use files="none" / files="css" / files="js" to control which library assets load — registering a library does not have to mean loading its files.