jeff_

Articles to Sidebar allow you to put some articles into the sidebar of pages.
When you use WP as a “normal” CMS, you could want to add some custom boxes into the pages’ sidebars. 
Whith “Articles to Sidebar” you can write articles, put them into :
<ul>
<li>a special category (in order to display to all pages)</li>
<li>a category called the same as the current page</li>
<li>both special category and category called the same as the curent page</li>
</ul>
When the article is displayed into the sidebar, the fist images it contains is used to illustrate. 
The displayed content is the article’s excerpt. If there is no excerpt, the extend (before the <code></code> tag) is used and if there is no extend, one is computed (55 first words) and used.
You can choose to put a link to the article or not. That behavior can be chanched for each articles by using a custom boolean var (articles2sidebar_display_link : 1 force link | force no link).
<h3>Versions</h3>
1 first public release 
1.1 better handling of little images ; adding the link to image when present
<h3>Translations</h3>
Actually, there are no translations, but the plugin code is ready for them.

article2sidebar

Articles to Sidebar allow you to put some articles into the sidebar of pages.

microkid

This powerful plugin makes it super easy to manually select related posts for your content. You can search and select posts that fit your criteria, all from within the write/edit post screen.
Creating a system of related items on your website will result in more page views per unique visitor, and will improve Google’s understanding of your content.
As mentioned by <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#relatedposts" title="WordPress SEO and Related Posts " rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress SEO</a> master Yoast:
<blockquote>
A very good alternative is Microkid’s related post plugin, which lets you manually pick related posts. This might cost a bit more time before you hit publish but might very well be worth your while.
</blockquote>
You can display related posts automatically underneath your content, use a shortcode or use the widget. Or, if you have some development skills, you can use one of the available API functions for full control of the way related posts are displayed on your website.
With its full support for Custom Post Types, this plugin will work perfectly for both basic and advanced WordPress installations.
See the official plugin homepage for <a href="http://www.microkid.net/wordpress/related-posts/" title="Wordpress Related Posts" rel="nofollow ugc">Related Posts for WordPress</a> for more info and discussion.
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Easily find posts or pages that might be related to the one you are writing with an integrated AJAX powered search utility</li>
<li>Easily add and remove relations with a single click</li>
<li>Extreme flexibility in the customization of the way the related posts are displayed on your website</li>
<li>The relationship created works reciprocal, which means that if post A is added as related to post B, post B is automatically added as related to post A as well (this option can be turned off easily through the settings panel)</li>
<li>Custom post types support</li>
<li>Multiple widget support with extended customization options</li>
<li>Shortcode support: add the [related-posts] shortcode to your post content to display related posts anywhere you want</li>
<li>Automatically display a list of related posts underneath your posts content. No need to add any PHP tags in your template files, but several <a href="http://www.microkid.net/wordpress/related-posts/#API" title="Related Posts for WordPress API functions" rel="nofollow ugc">functions</a> available for advanced users.</li>
<li>Available in a growing number of languages</li>
</ul>

So far good

Increase your pageviews and SEO by manually selecting related posts for your content. Easy reciprocal linking of related posts and pages.

article2sidebar vs Related Posts for WordPress