Certain content in sidebar box question

Hi, relatively new to the new WordPress (haven’t used it in years) and had a question about adding things to the sidebar. I understand they are called widgets right? Each box in the sidebar is called a widget? Let me try to explain what I’m looking for bear with me.

Alright, a thing on the sidebar that is for “Coming Soon” features. Could be interviews, reviews, articles, just to let people know what we’re working on or something to anticipate. I’d like it to just display an image and a small amount of text, perhaps just a sentence to sum up what it will be and then they can click on the image or text and be brought to the full article explaining more about it.

Now specifically I would love it if that could be set up so if I make a “Coming Soon” category it would display the latest post in that category…in the format that I mentioned above. Kind of like a featured content thing but in the sidebar…kind of. Rather than me having to manually change the widget every time I want to showcase something new.

What would be even better is if there could be 2 or 3 different coming soon items in there with some sort of pagination arrows or something to scroll from one to the other.

I’m just coming off doing a project with Joomla where this was easily achievable with a specific module, however I’m not so sure how things work with WordPress in that regard.

Is there anything like this out there? I’m really sorry for having to explain it so brutally but I think I got the essence of what I’m looking for. Are there custom widgets out there that can accomplish this? Is it something I just have to suck up and manually do? If I do find a plugin and install it will it use my theme’s css for the title and font and such? Any info would be great.

Thanks.