Display Any Native WordPress Widget Anywhere in Your Theme

Found this handy little function the_widget which you may find useful at some stage.

There’s at least 2 ways to use the function which is normally the case, (1)either add the template directly to your template file or (2)include it in a custom function from your functions.php file.

Here’s the default usage for direct use in template files which includes 3 parameters.

<?php the_widget( $widget, $instance, $args ); ?>

The first parameter, $widget, should be replaced with the PHP class name of the widget.

You can grab any of the native WordPress widget classes directly from the default-widgets.php file in the WordPress core files.

<?php the_widget( 'WP_Widget_Archives', $instance, $args ); ?>

Here’s the most basic usage of the template tag:

<?php the_widget( 'WP_Widget_Archives' ); ?>

You can also use the_widget function in custom functions with hooks and conditional tags.

Here’s an example of the most basic usage in a custom function:

And here’s an example of using the same widget class with all parameters for the function the widget uses which in this case is the wp_get_archives function.