[kh99]

There's no hook you can use to simply increase notifications_total or add to the menu, and it doesn't look like notifications_menubit is a template hook. But you can create a plugin using hook notifications_list and add to the $notifications[] array, like:

$notifications['test_count'] = array(
				'phrase' => 'My Test Notification',
				'link'   => 'wheretogo.php',
				'order'  => 20
			);
$vbulletin->userinfo['test_count'] = 1;

Also, for this to work you need a corresponding field in $vbulletin->userinfo, as shown in the last line. The count can be anything > 0.

You can look in function build_notifications() in includes/class_bootstrap.php around line 1067 if you want to see what's going on.