I'm would to customize jenkins by adding links to the left hand side panel and use the pages associated with these links to serve some custom content in place of the jobs/views table displayed by default.

I managed to add links to the side-bar using the sidebar-links plugin. Now I'm trying to see how to replace the content of the <td id="main-panel"> element with some custom content. The custom content is generated by some PHP scripts which ideally should be called by hudson every time the custom pages are requested, though if too complicated I can either create static content to be served by jenkins by calling my PHP scripts in a crontab or see if calls to the PHP scripts can be done by apache itself before the page requests are sent to jenkins.

I'm not sure writing a plugin is the best way to proceed and I would like to have your thoughts as to how you think I should implement this.