Building a plugin for a RSS feed news ticker based upon BP user interests

I’m fairly good at modifying existing plugins when it comes to minor tweaks, but it looks as though I will need to build my first plugin in order to achieve exactly what I’m looking to do and I could really use some help along the way.

Goal: To build a plugin which will display one or more RSS feeds in a horizontally scrolling news ticker based upon a Buddypress user’s interest(s).

Functionality desired: The plugin will need to query the member’s interests, which are selected from a custom drop down list in their Buddypress profile.

If the user has selected one interest, the plugin will need to find the appropriate RSS feed and display it as a scrolling horizontal news ticker.

If the user has selected multiple interests, I would like to have a small section of the news ticker bar display the RSS feed category (i.e. “Political News”) and after the ticker has scrolled through the latest headlines, scroll the entire bar vertically in order to reveal the next category, which will then begin scrolling the news feed horizontally.

If the user has not selected any interests yet, I would like to include a call-to-action where the news feed would have been displayed to encourage them to select some interests.

How you can help: I’m using a WordPress plugin textbook, but I would really appreciate any insight or feedback that can be offered by the community members. Seeing as this is my first WordPress plugin, I’m struggling with where and how exactly I should start developing, as well as selecting the best methods to use in doing so.

My current strategy:

• Use PHP for the if statement loop. (Not entirely comfortable with SQL queries yet)
• Use PHP to provide the HTML structure of the ticker for styling purposes (Feel pretty confident about this part)
• Use Yahoo Pipes to combine multiple RSS feeds for each interest category. (This is the best solution I’ve found for doing this)
• Use jQuery to generate the scrolling ticker. (I assume this is the best method)

Any comments, feedback and/or advice?

Thanks in advance!