Sharepoint, MOSS custom project/solution

I had some work recently in creating a custom solution for sharepoint and I had never worked in sharepoint before. I thought just like you find a lot of solutions and books of other technologies, I would be able to find similar things for sharepoint too .. But sadly that was not the case. There are lots of artcles, books on sharepoint administration/customization, but very less on actual development. You will find examples for creating web parts, adding custom lists etc. But my requirement has something more than all this

I had to create a package which could be given to a client, who could then install it into his sharepoint server. Then my new sharepoint "site" must be added as a "site" within sharepoint and the users must be able to see a customzed solution which queries my database and does various other things ..

This involved ..
- creating a solution
- creating a package
- adding custom web parts
- adding these custom web parts to the "default.aspx" page
- installing this package as a "solution" in sharepoint
- having this installed soltuon as a "template" in the template list while creating new "site"
- after creating this new site, the site must have my setting for the default.aspx page and follow my styles defined

How did I do all of these. Hopefully I get time to write it soon .. If there is anyone out there who needs a answer right now, do write to me .. or I will hopefully post all that I did in the next coupld of weeks

I am not sure whether the approach I took was the best one, but at least it worked for me ..

Rejo