Help with sidebar widgets

I notice that the plugins that were alrady installed with wordpress are not working when I activate them as well. I must be doing something wrong here.
R

The default theme in WordPress is not Widgets-enabled. If you downloaded the widgets plugin itself, it came with replacements for those default themes which are Widgets-enabled. Replace those themes, activate the plugins, and Bob’s your uncle.

Ok, I’m confused by Otto’s solution.

My theme isn’t widget-enabled, I figured this much. I downloaded a widget which came in a zip file. In the zip, there was only one file, the widget php file. This was uploaded and the plug-in was enabled from the admin panel.

What am I supposed to ‘replace’ and with what am I supposed to replace them with?

Ok, I think I figured this out months ago. But I can’t recall exactly what my post was about.

As well as activiating the plugin from within the WordPress admin panel, the author of the plugin has probably mentioned somewhere that a piece of code has to be inserted in a page.

The code is a PHP call function and while I do not understand what exactly a CALL is doing, it’s needed. Some authors will suggest where to insert this piece of code; some won’t. Basically, you’re going to have to learn a little bit about where calls should go in a page of code. Yes, it’s a learning curve but having toys requires u to learn too ??

Try harrassing the author of the plugin/widget you’re trying to install if you really aren’t sure what to do. Do try to learn though; authors get annoyed by useless people who just want someone to tell them what to do.