jethin

This plugin creates a “Home Slideshow” options page under the “Settings” menu in the WordPress admin. Editors and admins can create and manage individual slides on this page. These slides can then be displayed as a dynamic slideshow on a site’s home page using the simple ‘[home_slideshow]’ shortcode. (<a href="http://s89693915.onlinehome.us/wp/" rel="nofollow ugc">View an example slideshow</a>)
The plugin supports one optional “options” shortcode attribute:
<pre><code>[home_slideshow options="timeout=5000"]
</code></pre>
options: This attribute can be used to override default slideshow options or set custom options. Attribute values use query string format, e.g.: ‘option1=value1&option2=value2’ etc. Option names are in standard Cycle2 format without ‘data-cycle-‘ prefix. <a href="http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle2/api/#options" rel="nofollow ugc">See the Cycle2 website</a> for documentation and supported options.
Notes
Slides include image (required) and optional title, subtitle and link.
Links and image size can be set when selecting image. (Full size images recommended.)
Slideshows and slides are 100% the width of their container. Upload images that are at least as wide as the slideshow you want them to appear in.
Default Display: Aspect ratio of slideshow image area is set by the first image; images appear at 100% width / height of the slide container; images will show scaling in slideshows that contain both horizontally and vertically aligned images.
Default CSS ids begin with “hss-“, Cycle2 classes with “cycle-“. Default slideshow id is “home-slideshow”. Default CSS styles were created using Twenty Thirteen theme — some theme CSS customization may be necessary for other themes.
Slideshows look and perform best if images are sized to desired slideshow container / aspect ratio.
This plugin uses <a href="http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle2/" rel="nofollow ugc">jQuery Cycle2</a>. Cycle2 may conflict with previous versions of Cycle if used on the same page.

Home Page Slideshow

Create a simple, lightweight, responsive slideshow for your site's home page.

mmilan81

This plugin gives you possibility to create bullet lists for your posts. You can choose as many lists as you want and for each list you can select categories to include or to exclude posts.
Your posts can be randomized or sord by date. With title you can chose to show date or number of comments.
Lists can be show wherever you want – above or below posts, in archive, or on single post or page. Also, you can put a widget in a sidbar. You can choose to show lists only on first page or not.
You can modify your themplate to display list of post, add for single column or for multiple columns. If you want to show a list on one page (or post) you can use a shortcode [mm-breaking-news] when you write and the whole bullet list will be displayed.

MM-Breaking News

Displays lists of posts from selected categories. You can select how many different lists you want, sort posts by date or random.

Home Page Slideshow vs MM-Breaking News