A plugin question

Hey i have been wondering about writing a plugin and have spent most of the early morning trying to code it but im having a few problems.

The plugin is meant to find a thread in a mybb forum that has been attached to the post in wordpress and then count its replies and then display them as a comment count for that post in the wordpress thread. Then the click on the link would go to the forum thread.

It is also intended to allow the user to enter the forum thread id when creating/editing a post. If it does not have a thread attached to the post then it just displays comments like normal.

If the post does has a thread attached to it then it will not display comments on the posts page like it usually would. It would display a link to the forum thread.

So obviously i have a few questions.

1. How do i add an options area in the side menu for the administrator so that they can set the forum url and mybb table prefix? (I can create the pages its just adding them to the dashboard that im struggling with).
2. How do i interupt the count of comments for a post and then change that number and the link displayed?

Thanks.