I don’t like this because we are manually concatenating strings to create the label. The way YiiBooster/YiiStrap did this was as a ‘icon’ property which made for much cleaner code.
So besides just venting a little I’m wondering what others are doing.
But not sure if its the yii2 framework which should take such a requirement which probably will be different for each developer (will leave it for the yii team to decide - as they are the best people to answer this).
Even if its bootstrap specific - people tend to use different icon frameworks - for example there would be quite a few not using the inbuilt glyphicons and rather use in their production systems – frameworks like font awesome or even fontello.
I built yii2-icons to address a different need though. Offer one place to simultaneously manage icon frameworks - register automatically assets and render icons using a simple Helper.
Coming back, configuring a icon name probably can be an optional addon to each extension that loops through labels and icons. For example, in some of my other specific extensions the icon is indeed a configurable option (e.g. the export menu in yii2-grid).
You may try using a simple helper for your case like below;
function iconize(icon, label) {
return Icon::show(icon) . ' ' . label; // or directly render the markup
}
// then use it like below
$items = [
['label' => iconize('home', 'Home'), 'url' => ['/site/index']],
['label' => iconize('user', 'Account'), 'url' => ['/site/profile']],
['label' => iconize('phone', 'Contact'), 'url' => ['/site/contact']],
];
