Converting project to widget - need help

Hi all, I'm trying to convert this stand-alone slider menu into a widget following the Alloy Widgets Guide in the api doc. I've changed nothing in the code itself other than what the doc directed me to change, like renaming files to widget.*.

I've added this statement to my view

<Require id="sliderMenu" src="com.slidermenu.widget" type="widget"/>

However, I only get so far in the compile process before I get the error

ERROR] :  : Cannot read property 'manifest' of undefined
[ERROR] :  Alloy compiler failed

Another forum post suggested that the problem lies with the dependencies property in config.json. Mine looks like this

"dependencies": {
        "com.slidermenu.widget": "1.0"
    }

Apart from being an unhelpful message to the initiate, it gives me no indication how to proceed. Also, this particular widget itself has a widget. If I remove the dependency property, the error then becomes

[ERROR] :  widget "com.drawermenu.widget" view "widget" does not exist.
ERROR] :  The following paths were inspected:
[ERROR] :  /Users/mjstelly/Documents/Titanium_Studio_Workspace/mobilefood/app/widgets/com.drawermenu.widget/views/ios/widget
[ERROR] :  /Users/mjstelly/Documents/Titanium_Studio_Workspace/mobilefood/app/widgets/com.drawermenu.widget/views/widget
[ERROR] :  /usr/local/lib/node_modules/alloy/widgets/com.drawermenu.widget/views/ios/widget
[ERROR] :  /usr/local/lib/node_modules/alloy/widgets/com.drawermenu.widget/views/widget
[ERROR] :  Alloy compiler failed

even though this particular app worked perfectly well before I tried to widget-ize it. Consequently, my first foray into creating a widget has, not surprisingly, hit a wall. If anyone has knowledge of troubleshooting widgets, I would greatly appreciate your time.