I'm struggling a bit with getting the plugin/widget/whatever development done that I need to. I'm not sure if I'm just being obtuse or this is legitimately something that's not real straightforward. I do know that I did basically the same thing for wordpress in the course of an afternoon recently but have now been going round and round w/ MT & its docs for the last few days.
Basically I want to do 2 things:
1) A little admin section for setting up/styling some content to display in a "normal" widget
2) The "widget" (or whatever it should be called) needs to be displayed on the blog itself - not on the dashboard, but like where the Recent Comments show up (or anything through WidgetManager)
My best guess right now is that this needs to be a combo of a Plugin and a new Template Tag. It sure seems like there should be some simple way to extend the WidgetManager stuff w/o making people copy files all over the place, edit config files, etc., though. I'm also curious about typical installation steps for something like this - ideally I'd be able to deliver a package that could just be dumped in the Plugins directory and then have everything else setup/configured through the admin interface. I've looked around for plugins that sound like they probably do something similar (to d/l and poke through their code), but I haven't seen something that seems to fit the bill.
I don't think I need a lot of hand holding here, but some idea on how close my assumptions above are and maybe pointers to any helpful resources (yes, I have the doc links) could be very helpful.
Thoughts?
TIA.