WordPress Widget API

For theme-building purposes, I was trying, idly, to produce a string of the headings of all active widgets - and it’s not very easy at all. Perhaps, some very involved SELECT would have done the job, but it would be a horrible hack.

Must confess it, I’m not a great fan of how the widget data are stored - each box existing as a separate option and no simple relationship anywhere to tie them together.

Rather than going on about all this would be much easier in Rails, it seems some template tags are needed, maybe even in the form of a structured API..(?). This is particularly critical now that widgets have gone into the core with v2.2