graysea

Recent & Featured Posts Widget adds a list of recent posts or posts of your choosing with thumbnail images, post titles, dates, times, and excerpts.
Features:
<ul>
<li>Excerpt Length. Change the number of words in the post excerpt.</li>
<li>Excerpt Display. Show the excerpt as a dropdown when someone hovers over a section or display the excerpt directly on the page.</li>
<li>CSS Modification. Modify certain CSS values including image width, text position, and border.</li>
<li>Featured Posts. Don’t want to show recent posts? Enter a list of post IDs. The number of posts shown will depend on the total number of IDs.</li>
<li>Thumbnail Images. Choose to show featured image, or the oldest image attached to a post is shown by default.</li>
<li>Images of your Choosing. Enter a list of image IDs to replace the default images. Images are shown in the order listed.</li>
<li>Date and Time. Show or hide the post date and/or time. Choose a separator that goes between date and time.</li>
<li>Include Sticky Posts. If you include sticky posts, an extra post is added. I.e. if the ‘Number of posts to show’ is 5 and you select ‘Include Sticky Posts’, 6 posts will be shown.</li>
<li>Rectangular or Circular Image.</li>
</ul>

Recent & Featured Posts Widget

Display recent posts or manually selected posts with thumbnail images. Show the excerpt directly on the page or as a dropdown.

Aaron D. Campbell

Used to create a customizable rotating slideshow highlighting certain posts or 
pages. You can choose which posts or pages are featured by simply checking a 
checkbox on the write posts/page screen. The plugin uses the new post thumbnail 
functionality added in WordPress 2.9.
Requires PHP5.

Featured Content Showcase

Used to create a customizable rotating slideshow highlighting certain posts or pages.  Uses jQuery, which comes with WordPress (no conflicts).

Recent & Featured Posts Widget vs Featured Content Showcase