Exposing Page Variables to Alteration

How's this for an idea -- we put the following code in a new file (lets call it template_variables.inc):

function hook_template_variables($hook, $vars) {
  foreach (module_list(TRUE, TRUE) as $module) {
    module_invoke($module, 'template_variables_', $vars);
    module_invoke($module, 'template_variables_'. $hook, $vars);
  }
}

Then, we ask people to call hook_template_variables from within the _php_variables function. Then various modules could implement functions; in our case, that'd be template_variables_page, which would do the necessary things.

This would also mean that advanced_forum could solve their problem too (see http://drupal.org/node/252967 ).

Then we could create an issue requesting that this be incorporated into the PHPTemplate engire part of core.