CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I dont think customizing userdashboard.tpl is a good idea for your needs. as you mention, there are significant differences between what you need and what it exposes.

I suspect your best bet would be to:

1. create a civicrm form and page to do specifically what you need

2. add a menu item in the Menu.php files and call the appropriate forms in Invoke.php (note that this is becoming significanly simpler in 2.1 and no core hacks will be required). alternatively you could also do what you want as a drupal module (and call civicrm api's / BAO's directly)

3. You should look at the code in CRM/Contact/Page/View/*.php and get an idea of how we retrieve various part of contact related data

4. ping us on irc if you need any help or get stuck at any stage

lobo