Create CCK wrapper for Custom Pagers?

Not that you aren't busy enough or anything...

One of the things I've noticed (and I think someone submitted a bug report for it as well) is that if I use CCK template to alter the theme of a CCK content type that has a custom pager attached to it, the custom pager is *removed* if the template is altered in any way. One way around this -- I think -- is to create a cck wrapper that essentially says "put custom pagers here" so that it can be embedded as part of a cck node instead of added to it after the fact.

Mind you, I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how practical this solution is, but here is how I imagine it would work:

When a custom pager is created, it would have a new entry in the "pager position" dropdown list called "cck element" or something like that -- this would tell Drupal that it's position will be determined by the cck node it is associated with. You would then go edit the cck content type you want to put the pager in and add a new field -- on the fields list would be an entry for the custom pager, and can be selected and inserted into the content type from there. You'd have to do it more than once and alter the theme if you wanted the custom pager to appear "above" and "below" the node, but you could add a little more granularity and control to that if you wanted (for example, in the case of a webcomic you could have it appear immediately above and below the image iteself, rather than the entire node -- this would allow you to add other content to the node (like a transcript of the comic, or other links) while keeping the navigation of the node pretty static (immediately above and below the comic).

By using the pager position dropdown element as the selector that determines whether or not it is a cck item, I think you would avoid any unfortunate situations where you declare the pager as a cck wrapper AND tell it to place it above and below a node, resulting in the pager showing up multiple times on a page. And of course it can still be used to place the pager in regular nodes and views based on those nodes...

Easy, right? :)