Making your theme widget-friendly

If you want to be able to use widgets in your theme, you will need to make your theme widget-friendly (also known as widgetizing your theme). Widgetizing is actually pretty easy, and to be honest with you, we already took care of that when constructing our sidebar. I didn't discuss much back then, but now let's go back to this topic and explain how widgetizing works.

Going back to our sidebar

Back in the old days, it was very common for a WordPress site to use statically placed content blocks in the sidebar. In other words, the only way to place dynamic content in the sidebar of our sites was to use handmade code that would fetch whatever data we wanted and then display it. This...