How do I get the Social Media Plugin to show up in my Twenty Eleven child theme's header?

Question

Being totally new to WordPress and (extremely) rusty with PHP, I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to add the Social Media Widget to my site's header. I'm using the Twenty Eleven theme, as I need the site to have no sidebars. Ideally, I'd like the social media icons to show up either above or below the site search box (image redacted for client's privacy):

I've tried tutorials and have looked all over the web, but haven't been able to find anything that applies to my rather specific situation. Is this just too hard to do with this theme, and should I just go ahead and use icons instead of a widget? I'm pretty sure I can do this in functions.php and header.php, but how?

Answer 1

You can throw a widget anywhere into your template (if you do not want to use sidebar drag + drop) by calling the_widget.

In your case you would need to put this in the appropriate spot (maybe header.php or menu.php), you will have to figure out where you want it.

the_widget('Social_Widget ', $instance, $args);

Please view the ref page on what can be used for $instance and $args (for example this is where you put the widget title, parameters, etc): http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_widget

You should just use a register a new sidebar though , on account of this plugin have tons of options.