jonaspiela

Add a short teaser text with page thumbnail and link it to a page in your sidebar. The plugin takes care of correct linking. I am using the plugin on my own <a href="http://www.jonaspiela.com/" title="Jonas Piela" rel="nofollow ugc">website</a>.
Check out more details and screenshots <a href="http://www.jonaspiela.com/2010/12/24/wordpress-plugin-page-teaser-widget/" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.

Page Teaser Widget

Easily promote pages in you sidebar and forget about not updated links.

tepelstreel

Do you want to put a certain post in the focus? The Special Teaser Widget goes beyond other featured post widgets. The widget won’t be active, if the site admin hasn’t designed at least one style for the widget.
Define the look of the widget container, title container and the text. Style the links and pictures for as many widget models as you need. The changes to the different styles are shown with a dummy on the admin page of the plugin. Give your style a name and save it.
When using the widget in the widget areas of your theme, you first choose one of the styles, than you choose a post, a backup post (that will be visible when a single post page shows the featured post) and define whether or not, you want to show a post thumbnail.
If you don’t want to fall back to the post excerpt, you can write your own teaser text for the post. Make the widget title clickable and link it to a category or leave it like it is.
The Special Teaser Widget was designed for the needs of <a href="http://www.abounderrattelser.fi" rel="nofollow ugc">Åbo Underrättelser</a> was tested up to WP 4.1.

Special Teaser Widget

Put featured posts in the highlight by giving them different stylings in different instances of the widget.

Page Teaser Widget vs Special Teaser Widget