Matt Royal

Easily feature pages or posts on your homepage using a shortcode and the new HomePage Features metabox above your default Publish metabox. Pull through a featured image or icon, the title and excerpt or page copy if excerpt is blank then have it directly links to the page/post itself. The plugin will automatically align your features into columns & rows for you as well.
Requires WordPress 3.0 +
Get in touch with me at: 
http://mattroyal.co.za/
Features
<ul>
<li>Adds a new metabox to all pages/posts to select to use the current page/post as a featured item, choose the display order and icon you wish to use.</li>
<li>Automatically generates the layout columns based on how many features you have selected and you can optionally specify the rows you wish to use as well.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Usage</h3>
<ul>
<li>Go to any page or post and use the Feature On Homepage metabox to enable the display of this item.</li>
<li>There will be a red number next to the title, this indicates how many featured items you already have selected previously.</li>
<li>Choose the order you wish to have this item display, if you see the red indicator on 2 for example, this ones order will need to be 3. Adjust each page/post to get the correct order you wish.</li>
<li>Select an icon or use the default featured image option. If featured image exists this will override icon selection. Use either or, you cannot use both.</li>
<li>You can use the default excerpt metabox to add your custom information that will pull through or else by default it will pull through you content into the featured items.</li>
<li>On your home page or any page you wish to pull these items through on and add this shortcode. [foh_features]</li>
<li>If you have an even number of items pulling through and wish to have these display in more than one row, you can use the ‘rows’ argument. It must be even numbers (E.G. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc)or else it will fall back to a single row. [foh_features rows=”2″]</li>
<li>
If you wish to change the spacing between each column you can use the ‘gutters’ argument. These values are in percentages (E.G. 2 = 2%). [foh_features gutters=”2″] 
Please Note – NB!!
</li>
<li>
FontAwesome is only loaded into the admin area, you must already have or else enqueue FontAwesome on your website itself.
</li>
<li>There is minimal styling applied intentionally to ensure more flexibility for each unique site, easily just add your CSS to your custom CSS file to style it.</li>
</ul>

Feature On Homepage

Easily feature pages or posts on your homepage using a shortcode and the new HomePage Features metabox.

stesvis

This plugin allows you to choose which post categories youe site will show on your frontpage. Just go to settings and deselect the categories that you want to hide. To display posts from other categories on other pages you need to upgrade to the <a href="http://wppluginspool.com/wp-filter-post-categories/" rel="nofollow ugc">FULL version</a>.

Frontpage category filter

Allows you to show on your frontpage only posts from the categories that you select.

Feature On Homepage vs Frontpage category filter