Neil Batchelor

EncodeDotHost

EDH Recent Category Manager removes the manual work of curating a “recent articles” category or tag. Once configured, the plugin silently monitors your site and ensures that exactly the number of posts you choose are always assigned to your selected category or tag — no more, no less.
Whenever a post is published, unpublished, or permanently deleted, the membership is recalculated instantly. The oldest post drops out and the newest one takes its place.
Features
<ul>
<li>Settings page nested under the Posts menu in the WordPress admin.</li>
<li>Choose to manage either a Category or a Tag.</li>
<li>Choose any existing category (excluding the site default) or any existing tag as the managed term.</li>
<li>Select between 1 and 15 posts to maintain.</li>
<li>Switching taxonomy type or changing the managed term cleanly removes the plugin’s assignments from the previous one.</li>
<li>Changing the post count takes effect immediately without waiting for the next publish event.</li>
<li>No configuration files or code edits required after activation.</li>
</ul>

EDH Recent Category Manager

Automatically maintains a configurable number of your latest published posts in a chosen category or tag, in real-time.

Prasanna SP

This plugin creates a new widget which lets you show a list of recent posts based on categories or tags. This is a must have plugin if you want to exclude some categories in recent posts widget or if you want to show recent posts based on tags. By default the wordpress recent posts widget shows a posts from all category. But this plugin gives you more power to customize your recent posts widget. You can also display post date in the widget.
See the live action of this plugin on <a href="http://demo.prasannasp.net/custom-recent-posts-widget/" rel="nofollow ugc">demo site</a> or on Kennneth John Odle’s <a href="http://blog.kjodle.net/" rel="nofollow ugc">blog</a>.
Have any questions or suggestions? Create a thread in the <a href="http://forum.prasannasp.net/forum/plugin-support/custom-recent-posts-widget/" rel="nofollow ugc">support forum</a>.
Visit <a href="http://www.prasannasp.net/wordpress-plugins/" rel="nofollow ugc">this page</a> for more WordPress Plugins from the developer.
A special thanks to <a href="http://blog.kjodle.net/" rel="nofollow ugc">Ken</a> and <a href="http://www.joshlobe.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Josh</a> for testing the code.

Custom Recent Posts Widget

A widget to show recent posts list based on categories or tags

EDH Recent Category Manager vs Custom Recent Posts Widget