Jan Štětina

This plugins adds two widgets: Classified Recent Posts and Classified Recent Comments. They differ from the default widgets only in one thing – each listed link contains HTML <code>class</code> attribute describing which post it is related to. For recent comments the whole <code>li</code> tag also contains this attribute.
Listed classes are similar to the output from <code>get_post_class</code> (see <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_class" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress Codex</a>), each class has a prefix to prevent problems with CSS styling
<ul>
<li><code>crpw-</code> for Custom Recent Posts Widget</li>
<li><code>crcw-</code> for Custom Recent Comments Widgets</li>
</ul>
You can use this for example to highlight links to posts from chosen categories or witch chosen tags (or a particular post) via CSS.

HTML Classified Recent Posts & Comments Widgets

Default WordPress widgets with "class" attributes identifying posts added to links.

Nick Momrik

Retrieves a list of the most recent posts.
<h3>Configuration</h3>
You may pass parameters when calling the function to configure some of the options. 
Example: <code>mdv_recent_posts(10, '', ' ', true, 5, false, false)</code>
The parameters: 
$no_posts – sets the number of recent posts to display 
$before – text to be displayed before the link to the recent post 
$after – text to be displayed after the link to the recent post 
$hide_pass_post – whether or not to display password protected posts 
$skip_posts – allows skipping of a number of posts before showing the number of posts specified with the $no_posts parameter 
$show_excerpts – allows the post excerpt to be output after the post title 
$include_pages – allows recent pages to be show with recent posts
<h3>Version History</h3>
1.1.2 – Added a space before rel=”bookmark” 
1.1.3 – Fix the space for real. Props Sandro Bonazzola 
1.2 – Use the esc_* functions and cleanup coding standards

HTML Classified Recent Posts & Comments Widgets vs Recent Posts