craigsimps

Widgetized themes often include support for adding a featured page or post, but often there’s no easy way to feature a category from your blog.
With Featured Category Widget you can easily featured a blog category (or a category from a custom taxonomy, like products), add a custom image and optionally show the category description and a list of sub categories.
Features:
<ul>
<li>Add custom image and set display size.</li>
<li>Optionally show category description and/or subcategories.</li>
<li>Supports custom taxonomies.</li>
<li>Developer friendly hooks and filters throughout.</li>
<li>Translated into French, Spanish, German.</li>
</ul>

Featured Category Widget

Showcase a specific category with ease, including setting a featured image and listing child categories.

dcannon1

Small, lightweight (under 7k) widget that shows posts from the same category as the current post. Several options for customization along with numerous ordering criteria for posts. Displayed only on single post pages. Based on Related Links by Category by Andrew Stephens
Options
<ul>
<li>Title – Set the title of the widget (or leave blank)</li>
<li>Number of Posts to Show – Set how many posts are listed in the widget</li>
<li>Order By – Choose how the related posts will be ordered (including random posts)</li>
<li>Show Category Names – Toggle whether category names are displayed above groups of posts</li>
<li>Link Cat Name to Archive – If category names are being shown, choose to have them link to the category archive page for that category</li>
<li>List Posts Multiple Times? – If a post is classified under multiple categories use this toggle to determine if it will be shown under each category, or only under the first category it shares with the current post. This should be set to no if you are not displaying the category names</li>
</ul>

Featured Category Widget vs Related Posts by Category Widget