interconnectit

Spectacula

With this page widget you can create a page in the normal WordPress editor and then drop it in any widget space – you can even embed shortcodes, videos and so on, all from the usual visual editor, rather than having to type HTML into a text widget.
And you can even control the widget to a significant degree, meaning it can be hidden and revealed as and when you require it.
This makes for a much easier to use process and has proven hugely popular with our users for the creation of profiles, sidebar videos and more.
And you no longer need admin access to be able to edit sidebar content belonging to you!
In a few rare cases, with poorly coded CSS in themes you may run into problems, so you should test this widget with your theme, across several browsers, before using it on a critical live site.
The widget will not show up on the page that is chosen to show in the widget. So if you click through to the page the widget will disappear from the sidebar.
If you want to translate the widget interface the files need for that are held in a sub-folder called lang. 
Just copy the spec-page-widget-en-US.po file to match your language (spec-page-widget-xx-XX.po) then load it up in poedit and change what you need to change.
If you create a translation and you’d like your language file included with the plugin contact us at <a href="http://spectacu.la/" rel="nofollow ugc">Spectacu.la</a> and we’ll see about adding it.
<h3>The install</h3>
<ol>
<li>Upload <code>spec-page-widget.php</code> and lang/. to <code>/wp-content/plugins/spec-page-widget/</code> or <code>/wp-content/mu-plugins/</code> directory. If the directory doesn’t exist then create it.</li>
<li>Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress</li>
<li>You should now see the widget show up under ‘widgets’ menu. Drop that widget into a sidebar.</li>
<li>With the widget in the sidebar you should see the config for this widget.</li>
</ol>
<h3>The config</h3>
<ol>
<li>First select the page you’d like to show.</li>
<li>If you want a title to show tick the show title option. This makes two more options available, ‘link title’ and ‘alternative title’. If you want to link to source or use another title enter them in this new area.</li>
<li>Next we have an option to use an excerpt rather than the full content. 
By default WordPress won’t let you create an excerpt for pages so one will be generated unless you’ve used another plugin to create an excerpt in which case that’ll be used.</li>
<li>Hide the page from the normal WordPress list of pages. 
This lets you to remove links to that page from other parts of WordPress that use the wp_list_pages() call. 
If you have two of these widgets both calling the same page then hiding the page in one will hide it in all.</li>
<li>Finally hit save.</li>
</ol>

Spectacu.la Page Widget

Widget that lets you output the content of a page in any place that'll accept a widget and allows you to hide said page from navigation (wp_list_ …

Justin Tadlock

The Query Posts widget was written to allow users that don’t know their way around PHP to easily show posts in any way they’d like. It’s like having a cool WordPress developer as a friend ready to do your bidding. Seriously.
The widget has over 40 options to choose from. You can list posts by category, tag, custom taxonomies, author, date, time, name, or anything you can imagine. You can choose to show the full content, excerpts, or even a simple list. You can order the posts in all sorts of ways. Oh, and you can even show pages.
This is the widget that keeps users out of the code and gives them the ability to display items on their site how they want.

Query Posts

A WordPress widget that gives you unlimited control over showing posts and pages.

Spectacu.la Page Widget vs Query Posts