Seriously, I cannot understand why no one hasn't done that earlier before myself!
Recently, yet another time bookmarking a unicorn.aspx for another specific environment, I caught myself on why not to have Unicorn icon as a standard launchpad tile icon. Benefits of having it there against bookmarking:
- it becomes available not only for myself but for the rest of admin users in particular environment
- yes, by saying admin, I want to say that you can customize security for that shortcut
- if serialized, this icon shortcut becomes available on all the environments it is being deploys
So please welcome Unicorn Launchpad icon. You may download the installation package at the bottom of this blog post.
So, as you might know, all the Launchpad icons are taken from core database and you may find them by the following path:/sitecore/client/Applications/Launchpad/PageSettings/Buttons. So you may add a new icon by simply creating an item called Unicorn (of the template /sitecore/client/Applications/Launchpad/PageSettings/Templates/LaunchPad-Button) as a child of any LaunchPad-Group items (for example, Tools, along with Content Editor).
The much better option would be to duplicate already existing item that is available to admins only - in such case you'll also inherit permissions set) - AppCenter for instance. Once done, adjusts all the fields correspondingly. The most important field to set is Link, so make it pointing to /unicorn.aspx (but remember you may also include parameters, such as unicorn.aspx?verb=sync).
The next challenge is to set an icon. Unicorn is not a part of Sitecore, obviously, Sitecore won't have icon packs for it. Let's create our own icon pack for Unicorn.
Each of these drops down values above (Applications, Apps, Business, Controls etc.), in fact, is a zip archive underneath folder<SITE_ROOT>\sitecore\shell\Themes\Standard.
The structure of archive is the following - unicorn.zip\Unicorn\32x32\Unicorn.png - you may have icons for the other resolutions but I am referencing this one:
That's all the job and it took a couple of minutes!
Download ready to use package (19.7kb, keep in mind that Unicorn icon will be shown to admin users only).