Themes in eM Client are a great benefit. I appreciate the variety of predefined themes and that you store theme settings in an XML file that anyone can modify.
As a suggestion to help people modify themes, it would be helpful to have a place on your website that explains the settings in theme files. The tag names and description attributes provide clues, but additional information would help people who aren’t familiar with the underlying design of eM Client.
For example, there are many settings that I’ve tried changing, but I see no evidence of the change in eM Client. And there are some GUI objects in eM Client that I can find no way to change in a theme file even though I know they can be changed because they’re different in different predefined themes.
Specific examples of these situations are:
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The color setting “Transparent” obviously allows the underlying color to show, but it isn’t always clear where the underlying color is set (where it comes from).
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I know the colors of the buttons in the header of the main window (the Touch Input, Minimize, Restore, and Close buttons) can be changed because they look different in different themes, but I can’t figure out how to change them.
As a suggestion, maybe you could show pictures of all the possible eM Client windows and forms with numbers pointing to each object on a window or form that can be changed. Then show which settings in a theme file affect each object by number. This would allow users to cross-reference objects and settings by going from the theme file to a GUI object or from a GUI object to the theme file.
Also add explanations of settings, as needed, to help people understand them. For example, explain what conditions must exist for particular settings to be visible. How changing a particular setting may affect the appearance of objects that may not be obvious. Whether it’s possible to change the colors of default settings such as “buttontext” and “infobackground”.
And explain how to create the icons that show what the themes look like in Settings.
Providing this information isn’t a high priority, but I imagine that many of your users would find it helpful.