Wireless sensor networks are becoming a basis for a rapidly increasing range of applications. Habitat, flood, and wildfire monitoring are interesting examples of such applications. Each application has different requirements in terms of node functionalities, network size, complexity and cost; therefore, it is worthwhile time investment to design and implement a general purpose framework for wireless sensor networks that would be adaptable to any monitoring application of interest with a minimum amount of effort. In this manuscript, we propose a basic structure for such a framework and highlight a number of challenges anticipated during the course of this doctoral research.