Between functions.php, widgets and plugins, which is loaded first?

Question

Customer asks if a specific carousel plugin he uses can be widgetized. That means i should create a widget inside functions.php which calls the plugin's function. That means that the plugin's code has to be loaded first so taht the function be available to wordpress when the functions.php file is loaded, right? Would that work?

Answer 1

The plugins are loaded right before theme (yes, I've been looking for excuse to use this):

However it is wrong to think about either as point of code execution. For most cases everything should be hooked and executed no earlier than init hook. According to Codex widget registration with register_widget() should be hooked to widget_init.

Because of that order of load doesn't matter for this case, you will have everything loaded by the time widget needs it in any case.

Answer 2

You can have a widget inside the plugin's .php file (and have a shared global variable which they can both use), if that's what you're asking. Here's a tutorial with sample code I stumbled upon a while back.

Also, here's a list of actions run during a typical request, in order of execution. #2 and #10 suggest that plugins load first; not sure about functions.php.