Are there any official or unofficial guidelines for the styling of a widget?

A theme has near complete control over the appearance of a site, including the widgets. And any plugin could load a stylesheet that overrides elements of your, intentionally or not. There are guidelines to encourage certain standards of code quality, which are enforced to some degree if the plugin/theme is hosted on the WordPress.org plugin … Read more

my own SVN for a plugin/theme

Sure it is possible there is a great chapter about that in the Professional WordPress Plugin Development book (http://www.amazon.de/Professional-WordPress-Plugin-Development-Williams/dp/0470916222). I’ve already got a system for my premium plugins like that. Essentially you have to hook into the WordPress API requests and root them to your own API Here is an example for premium plugins https://gist.github.com/Horttcore/5197032

Injecting HTML on (arbitrary) admin pages

If you check out the source of the /wp-admin/admin-header.php page you find the following actions: Inside div#wpbody: in_admin_header, Inside div.wpbody-content: network_admin_notices user_admin_notices admin_notices all_admin_notices I’m not sure what you mean by the right location, but I guess the all_admin_notices action would be the most suitable one for you?