DaveE

<p>The default Recent Posts widget is exceptionally basic. I always find myself in need of a way to easily display a selection of posts from any combination post type or taxonomy. Hence, Flexible Posts Widget.</p>
<p>Flexible Posts Widget (FPW) is more than just a simple alternative to the default Recent Posts widget.  With many per-instance options it is highly customizable and allows advanced users to display the resulting posts virtually any way imaginable.</p>
<h4>Features & options</h4>
<ul>
<li>Customizable widget title</li>
<li>Get posts by post type(s) and/or taxonomy & term(s) or directly by a list of post IDs.</li>
<li>Control the number of posts displayed and the number of posts to offset.</li>
<li>Option to display the post feature image.</li>
<li>Select the post feature image size to display from existing image sizes: thumbnail, medium, large, post-thumbnail or any size defined by the current theme.</li>
<li>Order posts by: date, modified date, ID, title, menu order, random, Post ID Order; and sort posts: ascending or descending.</li>
<li>Each widget’s output can be customized by user-defined templates added to the current theme folder.</li>
<li>Multi Language support. Compatible with <a href="http://wpml.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">WPML</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/polylang/" rel="ugc">PolyLang</a> for sure. Not tested with other multi-language plugins, but it should work.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Plugin Hooks</h4>
<p>Flexible posts widget currently has two public hooks:</p>
<ul>
<li>Filter: <a href="https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/flexible-posts-widget/trunk/includes/class-fpw-widget.php#L191" rel="nofollow ugc"><code>dpe_fpw_args</code></a> allows filtering the query vars before submitting the widget posts query.</li>
<li>Filter: <a href="https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/flexible-posts-widget/trunk/includes/class-fpw-widget.php#L354" rel="nofollow ugc"><code>dpe_fpw_template_{$template_name}</code></a> filters the template file path used to display the widget output.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Future updates & feature requests list</h4>
<ul>
<li>Use search box instead of ID text field for post id’s</li>
<li>Shortcode functionality.</li>
<li>Get posts by Author.</li>
<li>Filter out the post currently being viewed.</li>
<li>Get posts from the same archive (term/post type/etc).</li>
<li>Limit results by a time period.</li>
</ul>


Flexible Posts Widget

This has got to be the most useful plugin of its kind.



Seriousl excellent plugin

An advanced posts display widget with many options. Display posts in your sidebars any way you'd like!

saucecode

<p>Minimalist Tag Cloud is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display your website’s most popular tags, categories or custom taxonomies as a widget or using a shortcode.<br />
The plugin styles the tag cloud in a minimalist style with the option to include tag count.</p>
<p>You can use Minimalist Tag Cloud as a widget or shortcode.</p>
<p>There are a number of options that you can customise:</p>
<ul>
<li>number of items (tags) to show</li>
<li>type of taxonomies (tags / categories / custom taxonomies) to show </li>
<li>include/exclude a list of tags</li>
<li>smallest and largest font sizes</li>
<li>font size unit</li>
<li>display format (flat / list)</li>
<li>flat format separator</li>
<li>order by and order</li>
<li>show/hide tag count</li>
</ul>
<p>Check ‘Installation’ tab for details on how to embed the shortcode.</p>


Minimalist Tag Cloud

Very nice little widget. After looking through all the other tag cloud plugins this is the one I found most flexible.

It just needs a bit of styling on the way it displays on the backend. But it's not important. It does its job!

Thank you very much :D

Great customization!

Customisable widget and shortcode to display tag cloud with option to show tag count anywhere you want.

Flexible Posts Widget vs Minimalist Tag Cloud