WordPress MU

I'm trying to find a way to make a specific widget default on every new blog. To be more specific, I'd like the WP-Ratings plugin to automatically show up in every single sidebar without making the user go to appearance-->widgets and drag it over.

I'll only have one theme offered, so the widget will be showing up in the exact same spot every time

I looked through this: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=8041 but it seemed out of date and didn't help.

I'm using WPMU 2.7

Thanks

Does it have to be a widget? You know when you put one widget in the sidebar, it knocks out the default sidebar?

Why not just hardcode it in the sidebar then? Especially if there's only one theme.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do...i'm just having some issues...here's what I have so far...please critique and make fun of me bc I don't really know what I'm doing (I'm trying to hard code a buddypress widget if that helps):

<div id="right-column">

     <div class="widget">

       <li id="bp_activity_widget_sitewide_activity">
       		<h2>Members</h2>
       			<ul>
       			<?php if (function_exists('bp_core_widget_members')) {   bp_core_widget_members($args); } ?>
       			</ul>
       		</li>

     </div>          

</div>

I have a very similar problem and I think we are looking for the same solution. I only want one sidebar widget to appear on every new blog (collapsing categories widget). I use plugin commander to auto-activate it, which works great, but the user still has to drag the widget into the sidebar. I'd like to auto-activate it AND have it automatically show up as activated in the Admin "Appearance > Widgets" sidebar area. The reason for this is because it makes more sense to the end user to see a sidebar widget in both the front and back-end of the site right off the bat, plus the widget has some really cool features the users can edit. BTW - I could hard-code the widget into the sidebar, but then it doesn't display in the widgets area. Does anyone know how I could accomplish this? Thanks
Terence

I want to know the same thing Terence. Does anyone have any idea how to accomplish this? I want to have a widget appear on the sidebar whenever a new blog is created. The user also has the choice of multiple themes, so it'd be nice if there was a way to do this without hard-coding it into every theme.

I'd like to know also.

I'm using the plugin New Blog Defaults from
http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/New-Blog-Defaults

It's a great plug in. But it does not have a facility to set the widgets for new blogs.