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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.

Sometimes when you divide up your WordPress content into categories it all ends up in sub-categories of one or two main categories that don’t have any content themselves.
With the widget you can add a list of sub-categories even if the parent doesn’t have posts.
You can display and filter sub-categories in various ways:
<ul>
<li>Use the parent category as the widget title</li>
<li>Show post counts in bracket next to the name</li>
<li>Hide empty sub-categories</li>
<li>Add a link to the parent category to the widget title</li>
<li>Show the full sub-category tree so it include sub-sub categories and so on as well</li>
<li>Display the list as dropdown rather than as links</li>
<li>Use the first category of the current post as the parent</li>
<li>Exclude one or more sub-categories from the list</li>
<li>List the categories in reverse order</li>
</ul>

Sub Categories Widget

This Widget lists the sub-categories for a given category.

Featured Category Widget vs Sub Categories Widget