twodayslate

Widget to display your site’s most recent categories.
Current options:
<ul>
<li>Max number of categories to display</li>
<li>Title</li>
<li>Display date</li>
<li>Icon (if set by <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-category-icons/" rel="ugc">Simple Cateogry Icon</a>)</li>
<li>Display post count</li>
</ul>
GitHub: https://github.com/twodayslate/Recent-Categories-Widget

Recent Categories

Show your site's most recently used categories!

jeff_

Articles to Sidebar allow you to put some articles into the sidebar of pages.
When you use WP as a “normal” CMS, you could want to add some custom boxes into the pages’ sidebars. 
Whith “Articles to Sidebar” you can write articles, put them into :
<ul>
<li>a special category (in order to display to all pages)</li>
<li>a category called the same as the current page</li>
<li>both special category and category called the same as the curent page</li>
</ul>
When the article is displayed into the sidebar, the fist images it contains is used to illustrate. 
The displayed content is the article’s excerpt. If there is no excerpt, the extend (before the <code></code> tag) is used and if there is no extend, one is computed (55 first words) and used.
You can choose to put a link to the article or not. That behavior can be chanched for each articles by using a custom boolean var (articles2sidebar_display_link : 1 force link | force no link).
<h3>Versions</h3>
1 first public release 
1.1 better handling of little images ; adding the link to image when present
<h3>Translations</h3>
Actually, there are no translations, but the plugin code is ready for them.

article2sidebar

Articles to Sidebar allow you to put some articles into the sidebar of pages.

Recent Categories vs article2sidebar