php in smarty template?

i am trying to add a list of links to the top of every page. i made a "local" dir in my matrix/templates dir and i am editing page.tpl. cool. but this link list is generated by another php script running outside of gallery. is there any way to exec php in the template?

or can someone tell me the painless way to do this by hacking together some kind of module or block or method or class or whatever that will generate this list for me, so i can then access the output in my cozy smarty template. i am pretty good with php but this is my first attempt at working with the g2 beast.