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I am trying to show for instance Five Most Recent Posts on my sidebar. I would like just the Title of the post. How do I do that? Does WP make it easy for me to do that, is there a plugin? I would like to format it as well. Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks!

Try this:

<ul id="recentposts">
<?php get_archives('postbypost', '5', 'html', '', '', FALSE); ?>
</ul>

Then style ul#recentposts {} to your heart's content.

You my friend.... are the man. Thank you for that.

Is it possible to have the default "Recent Posts" widget display and or not display posts by category?

I love WP so much as the platform for my blog that I've decided to migrate my entire (non-blog) site to wordpress. Most of the content will be as 'pages' but I'm thinking of doing some things like news releases and job listings as 'posts' so I automatically get a category page that displays excerpts of each release or opening.

So I want my "Recent Posts" widget to display posts of any category within the blog environment, but NOT display posts of category X, Y and Z because those are pages of my site. I've found plugins that create category-specific widgets, but that's not what I need.

I've debated setting it all up as discrete instances of wordpress, one for the blog and one for the site, but would prefer to not have to do that. Or would that be a good idea?

So you just want to retrieve a list blog titles from categories of your choice?
This can be done via a query:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts
So you search through all your posts,
limiting the categories it searches through,
and limiting the amount of results to display.
Then after the query you choose what you want to display from the query, e.g the blog title.

Thanks, that was a helpful start. On that page I found a way to exclude posts of a certain category from the loop, so they don't appear on my home page. But they're stilling showing up in the default "Recent Posts" widget.

That trick I used to exclude posts from a certain category on teh home page was this:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
query_posts("cat=-20");
}
?>

So if there were a way to add that same code, or logic, to the "Recent Posts" widget, that's what I really need.

Well you can just create your own widget without the use of a plugin :)

Try something like:

<?php query_posts('cat=-20'); ?>
<li>
	<h2>Recent Posts</h2>
	<ul>
		<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<li><a href='<?php the_permalink() ?>'><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
		<?php endwhile; ?>
	</ul>
</li>

So we are running the query at the start
Then creating the sidebar slot and design, might not need to do this if you are using text box in widget editor.
Then we decide what to show from the found posts, here we are giving a link to the posts found.

First, thanks a ton for your help Xdesi. This PHP stuff is over my head but with the help of smart helpful folks like you I can do some amazing stuff with WordPress. Standing on the shoulders of giants, right?

Unfortunately I tried the iteration of your suggestion that I figured I could handle -- dropping that code you provided into the "text box" widget. It didn't work, because the php isn't parsing, i.e. it's just appearing in the final/output html of my page.

Got any tricks to get it to parse? Else I'll need to treat it as a discrete widget and can't find a me-friendly way to do that.

I did find a plugin that goes 98% of the way to what I want to do, called Fuzzy Widget. It lets you display recent posts at any level of granularity of category, and even has an "exclude" function, but for some reason the exclude function works only by post or page ID, not category ID. Bummer.

A plugin called PHPExec I think it is allows you to enter PHP into your textbox widgets etc..

If this still doesn't work then you could simply add it to your sidebar.php manually as one of the items with the