making an old theme widget compatible

Hi all,

So a long time ago, I mangled a default wp theme into my own theme. Now I want to add widget compatibility and trying to follow some instruction I found in Support didn’t work. It told me to add something to a file that doesn’t exist. It told me to add some code to a file that did exist so I did that and nothing happened except then the widget interface page hung.

Meep. Can anyone help? Can you tell me very detailed-ly how to modify my theme to be widget compatible? I want to collpase my archive list into expandable/collapsible sets by year (rather than the defaults months).

Thank you!

Patricia