Using built in jQuery UI in my theme Every page of my theme will need to use jquery UI. I know it's included with Drupal 7, but I can't really decipher Drupal's way-too-technical documentation.  It looks like the only way to do it is with the template.php file.  But since I don't understand that file, I'm trying to avoid doing it that way.  

Is there another way, or should I just try the template.php file?
Adding JS to a page is really not that hard, even though you need to use php.

For normal JS files, you could do something like this

drupal_add_js($path_to_js)


Drupal has however registered jQuery UI into libraries making it easier to add both JS and CSS files for certain jQuery UI plugins. This can be done using

drupal_add_library($module, $library);


All the jQuery UI plugins exist in the system module, so you could do

drupal_add_library('system', 'ui');


or

drupal_add_library('system', 'ui.accordion');


Some of these plugins have dependencies because they use other plugins. Drupal handles this very cleverly and will included the components needed.

You can see the full list of jQuery plugins here. This is formatted as a PHP array, but generally the naming convention is ui.PLUGIN-NAME.

If you need to add the JS on every page you could simply add a preprocess page hook and add them there. This would look something like this in the template.php file.

function NAME_OF_THEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
  drupal_add_library('system', 'ui');
  drupal_add_library('system', 'ui.accordion');
  drupal_add_library('system', 'effects.highlight');
}