Widgets & plugins

We had someone create a theme for our fan site. The theme unfortunately does not accept widgets and the plugins that used to work on the old free theme and on the twenty ten theme, now don’t work. The “programmer” says that it’s HTML based and won’t widgetize it. We’ve created a functions.php and added the code as suggested in the Codex and added the code to the sidebar.php. Now, the widgets and some of the plugins are available at the back-end, they do not show-up. For example, the WP Tweet & the Text plugins used to work. Now, it does not even though they are active and have been added to the sidebar. Help, how can we fix it?