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.

cfischer83

Does your website utilize categories and tags? Does it use custom taxonomies? If so, this plugin will find similar content 
based on all your taxonomies. There are two ways to show related posts within your page.
<ul>
<li>The first way to show related content on your post is to use the widget provided. This only works when is_single() is true</li>
<li>The second way to show similar content on your site is to use the pk_related_return($post->ID); function which can be 
called programmatically anywhere you wish!</li>
</ul>
The Widget included with this plugin gives you the option to limit the amount of posts; it allows you to determine which 
fields to show: Featured Image, Author, Date, and Excerpt (Title is required); it allows you to determine which 
variant of the featured image to show: thumbnail, medium, large, or full. As of version 2.0, you can now decide whether the 
‘similar posts’ sorting prefers posts that are newer or posts that were created closer to the date of the post you’re 
viewing.
If you find the Widget doesn’t meet your needs or is too limiting, you can call the functionality programmatically using 
this function:
<pre><code>pk_related_return($post->ID, $args);
</code></pre>
Where $post->ID is the ID of the post for which you are wanting to show related articles.
The $args parameter is an array with the following values available to you (more coming soon):
<ul>
<li>posts_per_page (int defaults to 5)</li>
<li>thumbnail_size (string consisting of one of these values: “thumbnail”, “medium”, “large”, “full”. Defaults to thumbnail).</li>
<li>sort_prefer (string consisting of one of these values: “newest”, “closest”. Defaults to newest).</li>
</ul>
An example might be:
<pre><code><?php
$args = array (
 'posts_per_page' => 6,
 'thumbnail_size' => 'medium',
 'sort_prefer' => 'closest'
);
</code></pre>
The return value of pk_related_return is an array of objects that includes most of the fields within WordPress’s posts 
table plus permalink and featured image.
Future Additions:
Allow the user to specify only certain content types (posts, pages, custom) in a request. This would allow you to specify 
only products get returned, or only blog posts. This would only be an issue if content types share taxonomies.

article2sidebar vs Similar Posts Ontology