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Whenever a post is published, unpublished, or permanently deleted, the membership is recalculated instantly.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.

Ross Cornell

This plugin adds a simple widget that allows you to display a number of recent blog posts from a specific category. You have the options to choose a title, category, number of posts and whether or not to show the post date. The posts will be ordered by date just like the default Recent Posts widget included with WordPress.

very easy to use

Very usefull

Just like the default Recent Posts widget except you can choose a category to pull posts from.

EDH Recent Category Manager vs Recent Posts by Category Widget