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 solution wasn't very usable for the everyday user who might not be familiar with the PHP source code. So, a better solution needed to be found. Hence, widgets.
Widgets give us the ability to set the sidebars in a way so that they fetch the data that's been set in Appearance | Widgets. Therefore, the only thing the user has to do is go to Appearance | Widgets and pick whatever type of content they want to feature in the sidebar ...
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