How to add a block region to a node page in Drupal 6

As a Drupal themers / front end developers, we are always asked to push the envelope of what's possible with design and theming. With Drupal 6, custom block regions are usually added in page.tpl.php which is normally outside of the actual page node content / comments. It would be above, below content or in sidebars typically. Occasionally you have the need to add a block region within a node area. This comes in handy especially if you are using a custom themed node page that uses CCK fields, e.g., "node-[custom_content_type].tpl.php".  To accomplish this there are a few steps involved.

1. Determine and add code to the node type you will add it to in your theme. It might be simply node.tpl.php or a custom named node as mentioned above.
2. Add a preproccess node function to your theme's template.php
3. Add the new region your theme's .info file
4. Flush your site cache
5. Test it out either using context or the actual block page assigning an existing or new block to the new block region

First we need to determine the name of the new block region that we are going to add. In this tutorial we will call it "node_message".
In the node page you want to add code to determine where in the page you want to add it. This part is just like adding a
regular block region to page.tpl.php. In our example node.tpl.PHP, we will add the new code after the $content and post
meta variables. Note that your node or custom node template file may vary but this will give you an idea of what's possible.
Here is code near the bottom of node.tpl.php.

<div class="content">
  <?php print $content ?>
</div>

<?php if ($links): ?>
   <div class="postmeta"><?php print $links; ?></div>
  <?php endif; ?>
</div>

We now insert our new "node_message" block code at the end. Note that you could also wrap a custom
div class for the new code as well as illustrated in our example. This new block region should not already
be in page.tpl.php as you do not want the region to load and process twice so it should be unique to the node.tpl.php level.

 <div class="content">
    <?php print $content ?>
  </div>

<?php if ($links): ?>

    <div class="postmeta"><?php print $links; ?></div>

  <?php endif; ?>
</div>

 <?php if ($node_message): ?>

     <div class="node-message"><?php print $node_message; ?></div>

<?php endif; ?>

Now we need to tell Drupal how to process this new code so we will go ahead and add our preprocess function to our theme's template.php file. Note if your theme does not have this file you can go ahead and create it. If it is a new template file with nothing else added you need to add an opening tag but not a closing one. If you are adding to an existing template.php file with existing code, then it's not necessary to add the opening tag.

<?php
function my_theme_name_preprocess_node(&$vars, $hook) {
  $vars['node_message'] = theme('blocks', 'node_message');
}

regions[node_message] = Node Message