Custom block that's always the first thing in a region? I'm trying to create a region for my Drupal 7 theme that will be clickable drop-down to allow the user to log in/out, access their profile page and a few of other things. The best analogy I can come up with is that I'm trying to create something similar to the sort of drop-down that you see on sites like Twitter. (It's not exactly the same as what I'm trying to build, but close enough to demonstrate my point.)

Now, neither styling the region nor implementing a show/hide behavior in jQuery is difficult. The key here is to add a bit of custom HTML to the region that will wrap outside the blocks, but inside the region itself.

The output should look something like this:

&lt;div class="region region-name"&gt; &lt;!-- region --&gt;
    &lt;!-- custom HTML "wrapper" --&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="link-to-activate-dropdown"&gt;Click here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
    &lt;div id="wrapper"&gt;

        &lt; blocks go here &gt;

    &lt;/div&gt; &lt;!-- /custom HTML "wrapper" --&gt;
&lt;/div&gt; &lt;!-- /region --&gt;


It's also important to make sure users can't move or delete this special stuff, so I think this should probably go in template.php, but since I'm a Drupal theming newbie, I'm not sure.

Anyone have an idea how to do this?
Your "custom HTML wrapper" is only useful for the Javascript, so you are looking at this the wrong way: the HTML generated by Drupal should not contain it, and it should be the job of the Javascript to transform the markup of the region to fit its use.

You probably want something like this:

$('&lt;your selector&gt;').each(function() {
  // Wrap all the content of the region inside a wrapper.
  $(this).wrapInner('&lt;div class="my-custom-wrapper" /&gt;');

  // Create a link and insert it into the region.
  var link = $('&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="link-to-activate-dropdown"&gt;' + Drupal.t('Click here') + '&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;');
  link.prependTo($(this)).click(function() {
    // Your custom logic.
  });
}