I just found out about Wijmo. Wijmo is a javascript widget library that utilizes jQuery, jQuery UI and knockoutjs. Using jQuery UI allows the widgets to be themed easily with any of Wijmo’s premium themes, the canned jQuery UI themes, or rolling your own with theme roller.
Wijmo costs if you want to use it in a commercial application, but they do have an open source option that allows for use in GPLv3 projects.
I just switched to this new theme, and I wanted to transfer over the customizations I made to the last theme. I was a WordPress n00b when I started the blog, and I did not initially use widgets. To transfer all my customizations over, I knew widgets would be the way to do it.
I have the Last.fm plugin, and I made mods to my sidebar.php file to include it before. All I needed to do this time was put the shortcode in a text widget, right? WRONG! I knew there had to be a way.
A quick google revealed this post on using shortcodes in widgets. It turns out it is super-simple, but does require editing the functions.php file. You simply add the following:
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');