The Category Posts plugin creates a sidebar widget that displays the posts in one of your post categories. So for example, if you have posts that you’ve put into a “News” category, you can create a dynamic list of your recent “News” posts in your sidebar. You can decide whether to show just the titles of the posts, or to also show excerpts. You can control the order they appear, whether to show their thumbnails, and even decide how big the thumbnails should be. This is an easy to use plugin that can come in very handy.