Can you call a template file without assigning template to a page in the admin panel?

Question

This idea is just to protect certain sections of my theme from over-zealous clients. I would like to add pages, that exist in the front end and can be added to the menu (using wordpress 3.0 api) but the page NOT be present in the 'Pages' dialogue in the admin panel, and is thus not user editable.

Answer 1

You can hook into template_redirect like this:

function custom_template_redirect() {
    global $wp;

    if ($wp->query_vars['pagename'] == 'my-page-slug') { // check the page slug
        status_header(200); // a 404 code will not be returned in the HTTP headers if the page does not exists

        include(TEMPLATEPATH . "/test.php"); // include the corresponding template
        die();
    }
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'custom_template_redirect' );