While I was working on the new Taxonomy Rockstar module, and building in the backend features, It was clear I needed to provide some sort of API for other developers who find it short a feature or two (layout generation in this situation) should be able to interact with some built in API functions in order to extend the module. This IS supposed to be a be all/end all module for Taxonomy by my own expectations.

During my inital "what do I need to do here" planning phase, I ran across doing something that I haven't done before in a module, contributed or otherwise. So I had to do a little research on how to do this the "drupal way". It was apparent that I needed to use one of a handful of functions that appeared to deal with hooks, and invoking the functionality of other modules.