Embedding widgets permanently

This is how I set default widgets:

<div class="sidebar">
		<?php
		if ( !dynamic_sidebar('right-sidebar') ) :
			if (is_cp_theme_layout('standard,v')) {
				the_widget('comicpress_calendar_widget');
			}
			if (comicpress_themeinfo('disable_comic_frontpage')) {
				the_widget('comicpress_latest_thumbnail_widget','title=Latest Comic&thumbcat='.comicpress_themeinfo('comiccat'));
			}
			the_widget('WP_Widget_Pages');
			the_widget('WP_Widget_Categories','hierarchical=1&count=1&dropdown=0');
		endif;
		?>
		</div>

Basically, if the end user didn’t add widgets to the sidebar it will use those defaults i setup, allowing it to not be empty when someone activated the theme.

The key thing your looking for is the function called the_widget http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_widget

notice the_widget(‘comicpress_calendar_widget’)

that’s not a default widget, it’s one of my theme created ones

If you are properly creating your widgets per the 2.8+ widget code, you use I believe the registered name for the widget, which in my case I do this:

class comicpress_calendar_widget extends WP_Widget {

	function comicpress_calendar_widget($skip_widget_init = false) {
		if (!$skip_widget_init) {
			$widget_ops = array('classname' => __CLASS__, 'description' => __('Display a calendar showing this months posts. (this calendar does not drop lines if there is no title given.)','comicpress') );
			$this->WP_Widget(__CLASS__, __('Comic Calendar','comicpress'), $widget_ops);
		}
	}

the __CLASS__ is the classname itself so when registering the WP_Widget it basically keeps the same class name there.

Which the classname is then used as the_widget(‘thatnameregistered’)