I would like to be able to work a simple contact form into a page in my theme. This page needs to be inside the zp install ( its the sites root ) and have access to the zp functions as the homepage would.

What is the best way to go about doing this? I was thinking the htaccess should put this page request through the index.php bootstrap but I am not sure how to do this.

Thanks in advance.

index.php will load a custom page (from the theme) if it is passed $p=pagename.

Look at the distributed .htaccess for the bits about search and archive for examples.