There is one way to let drupal know about a theme function or template. There are two ways to send variables to a template, but one of them has a lot of disadvantages.

We'll use two theme functions, with an identical template setup to illustrate these methods:

Creating Theme Functions and Routing Them to a Template

There's only one way, hook_theme()

When creating a menu [ admin/build/menu/add ] there's a field for "Menu name". We use that value to load whatever array of menu links we want. In this example, we're using "secondary-links" which comes default on most drupal installs.

Discussion

This is a particularly nice technique to use along with hook_preprocessor_page. You can easily send your menu links to your page.tpl.php file from a module like this: