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.

Yann at WP&amp;Co

<h4>Quick and simple featured boxes as widgets</h4>
Adds a widget to display a square or rectangular block in the form of an image, title, and subtitle 
pointing to a specific post, page, category or theme.
Nice CSS styling. Recommended for inclusion in “magazine styled” home pages.
Multi-widget is supported, so that numerous articles or categories can be featured in a sidebar or home page template.
You can use the provided additional stylesheet, or customize your own.
Base package includes .pot file for translation of the interface, and English and French versions.
<h4>Translation</h4>
If you want to contribute to a translation of this plugin, please drop me a line by e-mail or leave a comment 
on the <a href="http://www.yann.com/en/wp-plugins/yd-featured-block-widget" title="Yann Dubois' Featured Box Widget for WordPress" rel="nofollow ugc">plugin’s page</a>. 
You will get credit for your translation in the plugin file and this documentation, as well as a link on this page and on my developers’ blog.
<h4>Active support</h4>
Drop me a line on my <a href="http://www.yann.com/en/wp-plugins/yd-featured-block-widget" title="Yann Dubois' Featured Block Widget for WordPress" rel="nofollow ugc">YD Recent Posts Widget plugin support site</a> to report bugs, ask for specific feature or improvement, or just tell me how you’re using the plugin. 
It’s still in an active development stage, with new features coming out on a regular basis.
<h3>Revisions</h3>
<ul>
<li>0.1.0. Initial beta release of 2010/10/14</li>
<li>0.1.1. Minor bug fixes, framework update 2010/10/25</li>
<li>0.1.2. Minor bug fixes, framework update 2010/10/25</li>
<li>0.1.3. Minor bug fixes, framework update 2010/10/26</li>
</ul>
<h3>Did you like it?</h3>
Drop me a line on http://www.yann.com/en/wp-plugins/yd-featured-block-widget
And… please rate this plugin –>

YD Featured Box Widget

Quick and simple featured boxes as widgets

Recent & Featured Posts Widget vs YD Featured Box Widget