wpcolor

<p>IMPORTANT you need to choose SET FEATURED IMAGE when you upload an image to your post. The plugin only shows featured images.</p>
<p>This plugin allows you to create a custom front page and other pages to show the latest posts. It will allow you to display your posts with different custom layouts. As an example it can make the posts on the front page look similar to a magazine or news website. The uses for it are many. It is easy to custom different layouts for your posts and pages.</p>
<p>Some Features</p>
<ul>
<li>Customize & theme your frontpage, page or post</li>
<li>Display Title, pictures, excerpt, categories, tags, biographic info, author, date for each post</li>
<li>Filter posts by category</li>
<li>Integrates nicely with many themes</li>
<li>Change width & height of thumbnail & image</li>
<li>Easy Customize Layout editor</li>
<li>Display posts with shortcode</li>
<li>Put text over images & thumbnails</li>
<li>All around plugin with many uses</li>
</ul>


Site Layout Customizer

Customize the front page & other pages. Display your posts with different layouts.

kirilisa

<p>Frontpage Manager allows you to customize how the posts appear on your frontpage in several different ways.</p>
<ul>
<li>you can have the posts drawn from all categories or a subset of your choosing </li>
<li>you can choose how many posts should display (this is distinct from WordPress’ built-in Reading Settings which applies to all blog pages)</li>
<li>you can have each post limited in length by number of characters, words, or paragraphs</li>
<li>you can choose which HTML tags should be stripped from posts</li>
<li>you can specify a read more link, etc. if you like </li>
<li>you can hide the category in the page title, if you wish</li>
</ul>
<p>The plugin will attempt to make sure that any tags that are interrupted by the post-limiting feature are matched so as not to cause formatting issues.</p>
<h3>Compatibility</h3>
<p>I have tested this plugin from WordPress 2.8.</p>
<h3>Download</h3>
<p><a href="http://kirilisa.com/downloads/projects/wordpress/frontpage-manager_1.3.zip" title="Download version 1.3" rel="nofollow ugc">Version 1.3</a></p>


Frontpage Manager

Lets you customize how your frontpage and/or main posts page appears in a number of ways: limiting by category/ies, number of posts, number of words/c …

Site Layout Customizer vs Frontpage Manager