Why don’t you create widgetized areas within your theme? That is probably easier and you will have more control over the widgets.
Look here for more info on create widget ready themes
https://codex.wordpress.org/Widgetizing_Themes
Or is that the part that you tried and didn’t work?
I really need to do a lot of research into widgets etc as I usually just hack around in the code to make everything work properly. Most widgets I have added to date I do through php code as I have found this to be more flexible. Maybe I should move towards the more user friendly way(?)
Do you happen to know the arguments expected by the functions above? For this particular project I think it will be easier to add the widgets via PHP code.
Thanks!!!
The widgets you are talking about are not designed to be called from a template. They just don’t work very well for that situation. Perhaps you’d like to investigate the bp custom loops that use template tags. These are designed to be used in templates : https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/