flexostudio

Choose from which category and how many posts you want to show, as is shown 
name and picture of the contents of this publication.
<h3>How to use</h3>
<ol>
<li>From the Administration -> settings go to post manager options enter data, generate code copy and paste the desired place in post</li>
<li>FlexoPostManager::category_post($_args); where $ _args is an array of type 
$args = array( 
 ‘category’ => ‘pictures’, 
 ‘count’ => 5, 
 ‘h_num’ => 3, 
 ‘master_class’ => ‘post-preview’, 
 ‘return’ => false, 
 ‘title_first’ => true, 
 ‘template_func’ => ‘format_post_as_picture’, 
 ‘order_by_postmeta’ => array( 
 ‘key’ => ‘fb_score’, 
 ‘order’ => ‘DESC’ 
 ), 
); 
you can put this wherever you want in header, in sidebar …..</li>
</ol>

flexo-posts-manager

shows your chosen number of publications in the selected category

AndreSC

AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog.
Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System.
Now with the ability to override itself.
<h4>How to:</h4>
Once the plugin is installed, go to “Tools”, “AStickyPostOrderER”.
The plugin displays a list of your categories as well as a list of tags in use. 
The category and tag names are links (used to make ‘Sorties’) each followed by radio buttons and a Limit field.
Sorties: Click a category or tag’s name below to manually create an order of some or all of its contained posts to be shown before the default ordered posts in that category or tag, or re-arange all posts as they apear on home(index) and archive pages.
(Please Note: You have to individually set order for each category or sub category you want to order posts in, if enough people express it as a requirement I’ll add functionality for the plugin to propagate order set in the index view to either all- or specific categories tags. Mail me if you need this.)
AND / OR
Meta: Use the radio buttons to specify meta-stickyness, respectively:
<ol>
<li>
Super-sticky: Show before anything else (you can set a limit for how many posts from this cat or tag should be given this preferential treatment, e.g. if you want the latest post with the tag ‘events’ to show before anything else in any category listing that contains that post place 1 in the text field next to the ‘events’ tag and set it’s radio button set to ‘Super-sticky’ )
</li>
<li>
Sub-sticky: Show after individually ordered posts (‘Sorties’) for given view but before un-sorted posts
</li>
<li>
Default: Treat normally (except for individually ordered posts)
</li>
<li>
Droppy: Show only after everything else 
and remember to click ‘update meta-stickyness’ at the bottom of the page for your changes to, ahemmm, ‘stick’ . . .
</li>
</ol>
<h4>Override</h4>
If you want to have posts listed without the customised order you can do that by having ‘?aspo=vanilla’ in the url, or if you created a listing with query_posts add aspo=vanilla, eg. ‘query_posts(‘cat=13&showposts=10&aspo=vanilla’);’

AStickyPostOrderER

Lets you manipulate the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all.

flexo-posts-manager vs AStickyPostOrderER