Joseph Hinson

Do you have a lot of categories and are sick of having a huge list in your sidebar? Want to highlight only a few of them to make your site easier to navigate?
While redesigning WordPress sites for our clients we kept running into this problem over and over. They had a huge list of legacy categories but only wanted to highlight a few of them. We wrote this plugin to allow them to select which categories to show and which categories to initially hide.
All categories are still accessible by a “see all” link at the bottom of the list.
Add the widget to your sidebar to make it live.

Category Expander

Allows WordPress Admins to show only a selected few categories on the sidebar and hide the rest from view until visitor clicks "See All".

ajberasategui

This plugin provides a Search Widget similar to the default WordPress one but with the abilty of adding category select 
lists to restrict the search query to only those categories.
Any comments, reviews, support questions are very much welcome!!!

AB Categories Search Widget

Insert a search form widget that allows visitors to add category filters to the search query.

Category Expander vs AB Categories Search Widget