Jack Reichert

This plugin was developed to display excerpts from random posts in a category. jQuery is used for fading the plugin in and out. It’s a great way for displaying testimonials of clients or just giving a snapshot of content from your site.
Shortcode added as of version 1.4
The most basic use is: <code>[reFader]</code> this will use the default options. 
Here is an example of all the options in use 
 [reFader title=”Random Excerpts” cat=”23″ type=”post” amount=”5″ length=”50″ duration=”5000″ linked=”no” url=”http://www.jackreichert.com/”]
This will show 5 (amount) posts (type) from category #23 (cat). It will show 50 (length) words from each post and fade out/in every 5 seconds (duration). It will not link each title to the corresponding post, but it will link all the titles to this plugins page (url).

Random Excerpts Fader

Creates a widget that takes randomly a number of excerpts from a category of your choice and fades them in and out.

Douglas "BearlyDoug" Hazard

Recent Posts Ultimate
This plugin takes the best features of five VERY popular recent posts plugins, tosses in the ability to show posts with or without HTML code and gives you a Shortcode builder (which you can copy/paste anywhere on a page, a post or inside a widget), while allowing custom post types to be used.
You can limit it to certain post types, certain categories, sort it by title or date posted, ascending, descending. You can even select whether you want the featured image shown (as a thumbnail), hide/show the title, link the title, the text, control how many words you want shown in the snippet, etc.
Important note: Not all features mentioned above are in this current version. See below for our planned updates.
While this is the first version of this plugin, it should be robust enough to handle just about any of your needs.
Current Version 1.0.7
<h4>Features:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Shortcode builder allows you to customize most aspects of the post (hide post title, category, date).</li>
<li>Works anywhere you can use shortcode.</li>
<li>Responsive, width-wise. Height of div will adjust automatically.</li>
</ul>
This plugin is not compatible with WordPress versions less than 5.0. Requires PHP 5.6+.
<h4>TROUBLESHOOTING:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Check the FAQs/Help located on WordPress’ Plugin page, or the Support forum on WordPress.org’s plugin area.</li>
<li>The Shortcode Builder has been extensively tested with both jQuery version 1.12.4 and 3.5.1, without any issues. The output, however, does not need jQuery/JavaScript.</li>
</ul>

Random Excerpts Fader vs Recent Posts Ultimate