Abbas S

This plugin helps to create a widget and shortcode to create featured blogs.
Following are the things done
A settings page created for featured. 
You can enter the blog id in the blog id: text box in the settings page and click on get blog details button . 
This will fetch( by AJAX ) get the blog name , blog link , and blog Avatar ( based on the avatars plugin ). 
It will also add two buttons 
 Add this blog -> Which will add this blog to the featured blog list 
Can -> it will not add the blog to the featured blog list. 
Then saving the settings will save it. The settings are saved different for each blog . 
Then the user can use the widget as follows . 
Drag the widget on a widgetize area. 
Enter the blogids in the widget , then those blogs will be used as featured blogs. 
If nothing is entered in the bloglist the blog list from the settings will be taken. 
The user can use the short code as follows
The user can specify the blog list in short code argument. For e.g:- [multisite_featured_blogs blogids=”3,2″].The those blogs will be displayed in the featured blog list. 
If the user passes no argument then in case the featured blog list will be taken from the settings. For e.g:- [multisite_featured_blogs]
This plugin was done as a part of some work done for http://premium.wpmudev.org/ , but was later not released. 
Thanks for all the help for this plugin from WPMU Dev

Multisite Featured Blog

This plugin helps to create a widget and shortcode to create featured blogs

DCoda

This plugin is only supported on PHP 5.2 or greater.
 
MUWidgets adds widgets to extend the standard WordPress widgets to be able to run as if on another site on the Multisite installation.
You now have a number of new widgets prefixed with the word ‘Site’ that operate the same as the standard WordPress plugins, just with the addition of a ‘Site’ option in the setup. 
You are able to select any Site on the Multisite installation that you have administration access to. 
 Just select the site and click ‘save’ now the widget is operating as if it was on the other site, enabling you to display for example the blogroll or recent posts from the main blog. 

If you are having trouble and cannot find the answers in the <a href="http://muwidgets.dcoda.co.uk/help/faq/" rel="nofollow ugc">FAQ</a> you can post your support questions to the <a href="https://wordpress.org/tags/mu-widgets" rel="ugc">WordPress Support Forum</a>
If you find Multisite Widgets useful please rate it at <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mu-widgets/" rel="ugc">wordpress.org</a> and please consider making a <a href="http://muwidgets.dcoda.co.uk/donate/" rel="nofollow ugc">donation</a> to help us set aside more hours to maintain Multisite Widgets
Multisite Widgets is written by <a href='http://dcoda.co.uk' rel="nofollow ugc">dcoda</a>
You can check out our other plugins <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/users/dcoda/" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>
If you require a custom plugin you can contact us <a href="http://dcoda.co.uk/contact/" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a> and maybe we could write it for you.
<h3>Copyright</h3>
(c) Copyright DCoda Limited, 2007 -, All Rights Reserved.
This code is released under the GPL license version 2, available here:
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt" rel="nofollow ugc">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt</a>
There are so many possibly configurations of installation the plugin can be installed on we limit testing to a PHP 5.2+ Linux platform running the latest version of WordPress at the time of release but it is released WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; 
 without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Multisite Widgets

Extends the standard WordPress widgets to be able to run on another blog on the site.

Multisite Featured Blog vs Multisite Widgets