How to widgetize a theme with dirty code

I happen to have a brand new wordpress blog, for which I have found the perfect theme and a few widgets I would've loved to have.

The problem was that this specific theme has some very dirty code so the traditional way of widgetizing did not really work. After several hours of frustrations, I smacked myself on the forehead and this is what I did:

in the functions.php I added:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

Code (markup):

This is the standard I know.

After that I went to sidebar.php and (the breakthrough came here) instead of trying to widgetize it all, I settled for the area between "Categories" and "Monthly archives" so I inserted the following code:

<ul>

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

</ul>

Code (markup):

And voila now I have a blog with widgets

I really hope that this will help other bloggers avoid my headaches.

Happy blogging.

Regards, George