Development/Tutorials/Plasma5/ThemePortingToPlasma5

While the basic format of Plasma themes has not changed since the first version of Plasma, by the time in Plasma 5 some backward-incompatible changes happened for the range of elements expected in the themes. Here is a list of the changes, please supplement if changes are missing.

KRunner

dialogs/krunner is no longer used by KRunner, instead dialogs/background is applied.

Changes to do:

• remove dialogs/krunner SVGs

Logout/Shutdown dialog

dialogs/shutdowndialog is no longer used. Instead the the implementation of "logoutmainscript" of the active Plasma LookAndFeel package defines the look of that dialog, with the default Breeze implementation not using any special theme elements.

Changes to do:

• remove dialogs/shutdowndialog SVGs

Panel background

The "*-mini-*" variants from the widgets/panel-background SVGs are no longer applied, instead always the normal "[prefix-]*" elements are used.

Changes to do:

• remove all "*-mini-*" variants
• ensure all the "[prefix-]*" elements include the potential borders (e.g. the "north-*" ones have the "*left*", "*bottom*" & "*right*" ones)

(often simply renaming the "*-mini-*" variants to their non-mini counterparts and removing the old ones before is all to do)

Notes

The notes applet no longer uses the complete widgets/notes SVG file as shape for a note. Instead it expects 10 elements in the widgets/notes SVG, one note shape element with name "[color]-notes" per each supported color: "white", "black", "red", "orange", "yellow", "green", "blue", "pink", "translucent", "translucent-light".

Changes to do:

• name the existing shape with a name for a matching color
• add 9 more variants for all the missing colors

Extender

The widgets/extender-background SVG is no longer used.

Changes to do:

• remove widgets/extender-background SVGs

Shadows (panels, tooltips, dialogs)

The window/compositing manager no longer automatically adds shadows to windows. But leaves it to the windows to provide shadow pixmaps matching the light model of the current theme.

Changes to do:

• add shadow elements & hints to the SVGs of dialogs/background, widgets/panel-background, widgets/tooltip (see Details)