WordPress MU

OK, I am in the process of creating a website for diabetics. The site is now up and running although I am still doing alot of tweaking, mostly cosmetic. I have installed Wordpress mu along with BBpress, integration there is fine. I have added some plugins for users to use if they wish, all is good. What I want to do now is allow users to track their glucose levels from their dashboards.

Bear in mind that I have never created a plugin but I figure that this could be done with a plugin so here are my questions:

1. Can a plugin be created that once loaded into MU would automatically just put this functionality into all users dashboards but give the user no sense that it is a plugin. In other words to make it seem like it is just part of the MU installation?

2. If Yes, would it be best to put it into the MU-plugins folder?

3. If No, could this be hardcoded into MU?

I know these are probably stupid questions to most of you, so please bear with me and be gentle! :-)

Yes, the mu-plugins folder is good for that. Any plugin placed there will be active for all users and will not be displayed on the plugin list, so users neither know about the plugin nor are able to disable it.

Just make sure the code is as lightweight as possible, as anything in the mu-plugins folder runs all the time. Like it were part of the core. :)

I actually think your idea is pretty good.