srcoley

Let’s you select a specific category for featured posts, and manage those selections on the WordPress dashboard.
Most WordPress themes have you manage featured posts by selecting a “Featured” or “Top News” category for your special articles. This method has worked pretty well for both me and others. It’s only downfall is that you must go to edit that post in order to “feature” or “unfeature” it. Well I’m putting an end to that. With this plugin, you can select which posts get featured right on the dashboard.
To put it simply: You can manage categories from the WordPress Dashboard.

Featured Post Manager

Let's you select a specific category for featured posts, and manage those selections on the WordPress dashboard.

tepelstreel

The Featured Post Widget is a fully customizable widget, that displays a single post. You can decide, whether or not the post thumbnail is displayed, whether the post title is above or beneath the thumbnail and a couple of more things. And of course, you can style the widget individually.

Featured Post Widget

With the Featured Post Widget you can put a certain post in the focus and style it differently.

Featured Post Manager vs Featured Post Widget