Widgets are self-contained building blocks for your views, a way to combine complex logic, display, and functionality into a single component. A widget:
* May contain advanced PHP programming
* Is typically configurable
* Is often provided data to be displayed
* Returns HTML to be shown within the context of the view
There are a good number of widgets bundled with Yii, such as [active form](form.md),
breadcrumbs, menu, and [wrappers around bootstrap component framework](bootstrap-widgets.md). Additionally there are
extensions that provide more widgets, such as the official widget for [jQueryUI](http://www.jqueryui.com) components.
In order to use a widget, your view file would do the following:
```php
// Note that you have to "echo" the result to display it
echo\yii\widgets\Menu::widget(['items'=>$items]);
// Passing an array to initialize the object properties