In another post I discussed the idea of placing a sidebar into your theme and using it to manage the navigation menu of your site. I came to the conclusion – proposed by other people from the WordPress community as well – that you can use a sidebar for basically anything but not just a sidebar.
Although you can find this information in the Codex too, I would like to show you how easy it is to add a sidebar somewhere into your theme. You’ll see that it’s just about adding some function calls here and there – that’s it and you’ve got a new sidebar that can hold arbitrary widgets.