Image displaying various emoji.

๐Ÿง WordPress Adds Emoji 11 Support

๏ปฟNote: This post is regarding upcoming WordPress 4.9.8 and this is not applicable to production sites… yet.

In WordPress 4.9.8, among the improvements will be support for the latest Emoji 11 release. WordPress, technically, has already supported itโ€”you’ve been able to add a ๐Ÿฆธ or ๐Ÿฆน character even since general emoji support was added. One of the pieces of emoji support within WordPress was using the Twemoji library to polyfill emoji that your operating system didn’t support.

In other words, while you can add any Unicode character to your post, it is generally up to your operating system to support it, except for emoji, which WordPress provides a backwards-compatible way for them to display. Emoji 11 went live in early June and WordPress 4.9.7 adds support for the polyfill for these new emoji. Have an old computer? Apple hasn’t released a new version of OS X yet? You’re not on Android P, which is only in development anyhow? No problem, WordPress has your back.

So, no matter if you’re in the heat of summer ๐Ÿฅต or the dead of winter ๐Ÿฅถ, or if you’re ๐Ÿฅบ or ๐Ÿฅณ, WordPress is here for you. There are a lot more than just a few smileys or the all-important cupcake ๐Ÿง. There are a ton of science-related emoji ๐Ÿงฌ and ๐ŸฅŽ to supplement the existing โšพ๏ธ.

If you’re reading this while, um, doing something else ( ๐Ÿงป ), Emojipedia has a great run down of the new emoji, specifically as presented by Twemoji.

I’m a little excited by the cupcake emoji, so I decided to use real cupcakes to help make it happen…. These baked goods would be from my wife, Vanessa’s own Quรฉ Bueno Bakery, which is a bronze level Unicode sponsor for the cupcake emoji.

Okay, maybe I’m more than a little excited.

https://twitter.com/GaryPendergast/status/1005074470455861248

If you’re a ๐Ÿฆธ and testing out Gutenberg, the emoji won’t yet render when editing a post. There’s an issue for itโ€”need to find a good way to ensure the emoji aren’t saved as images when they’re rendered via Twemoji.

What is your favorite new emoji coming soon to your WordPress site?

Comments

3 responses

  1. Brandon Kraft Avatar

    Note: I updated the original post to denote WordPress 4.9.8. The 4.9-branch patch wasn’t in yet before 4.9.7 shipped for the security fix.

    1. Claus ร˜mand Avatar

      I have started to disable emojis due to performance. Takes a little time to load them and speed is important to me. On the other hand Gutenberg is simply the best thing that has come out for wordpress in a long time.

  2. […] to do with the newest emoji release, which WordPress contributor Brandon Kraft writes about here. After I tried matching his page source code for things like charset=”UTF-8″, I still […]

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