After better part of two days, and based on the dataverse example, my plugin settings page (with navigation stuff and "hello world" string drawn from the I18n file) appear, but I'm also getting a warning.

Progress is very, very slow and trolling through the support group it looks like a lot of people have had the same experience - an extremely steep learning curve and lots of trial and error. This looks like it's intended for people that spend all day every day for months at a time on this and just get to know all the nuances of how the various types of classes, events and invocations all work. Even the little bit I've done so far I'm hard pressed to remember how all the bits fit together and what the various invocations are doing. I would have had no chance whatsoever without Alec's suggestion to base what I'm doing on the dataverse plugin.

I have:

1) added the locale folder and included an en_US file and started using conventions such as this in non-smarty php files:
Locale::translate('plugins.generic.openReview.description')
and this in smarty tpl files:
{translate key="plugins.generic.openReview.settings.testString"}
to support I18n of the GUI.

2) added the managementVerb 'settings' in OpenReviewPlugin.inc.php which imports the file classes.form.SettingsForm

3) added classes/form/SettingsForm.inc.php. I don't really understand how it does it, but it somehow invokes the display of the GUI using templates/settingsForm.tpl

4) added templates/seetingsForm.tpl which is the smarty template that contains the stuff displayed to the user.

My plugin settings page (with navigation stuff and "hello world" string drawn from the I18n file) appear, but I'm also getting this warning. I have no clue what's causing this.

ojs2 has produced an error Message: WARNING: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home1t/sarneil/www/public/ojs-github/ojs/cache/t_compile/%%36^36E^36E89D0E%%header.tpl.php:9) In file: /home1t/sarneil/www/public/ojs-github/ojs/lib/pkp/classes/core/PKPRequest.inc.php