tepelstreel

The Category Column is mainly designed to give your blog a bit more of a newspaper behaviour. E.g. The plugin shows the latest posts from all categories with an offset of three posts (which are in the main column) on our homepage.
If there is a post thumbnail, it will be displayed above the headline of the post. No further text will appear. If there is no thumbnail, only the headline and the excerpt of the post will be shown. When the plugin can detect neither the thumbnail nor the excerpt of a post, it will display just the first couple of sentenses (or words) of a post.
The Category Column was tested up to WP 4.5. It should work with versions down to 2.9 but was never tested on those.

Category Column

The Category Column does simply, what the name says; it will show excerpts of the latest posts in your sidebar.

Yet another recent post widget. It shows the last post of your blog, where and how you want. You can define, on which pages of your site it shows and whether you want to show a post thumbnail or not. Decide, whether the links go to the post, to the attachment page or simply to a file. You can style the links in the plugins settings and each widget container differently.
The plugin was tested up to WP 4.5 and should work with versions down to 2.7 but was never tested on those.

A5 Recent Post Widget

With the A5 Recent Post Widget you can put your latest post in the focus and style it differently.

Category Column vs A5 Recent Post Widget