Currently, in wp 2.8 you can output a arbitrary widget anywhere in the theme with "the_widget()" function.
The problem is that the output cannot be stored in a variable, so the theme author cannot allow the user to place this widget anywhere inside a post for example (eg. using shortcodes)
Something just like "get_the_content" is to "the_content"..
I'm using PHP buffer output to achieve this (ob_get_contents), but I don't know if this the best way to do it.
Is there any chance you can add a function that does this in 3.0?