For event management, I just discovered this fabulous looking plugin: Events Manager by nutsmuggler, netweblogic Events Manager is a full-featured event management solution for Wordpress. It supports recurring events, venues data, RSVP and maps. Has a sidebar widget and shortcode for an events list, calendars and description, as well as template tags.
I use the Category Posts widget on a lot of sites to show a list of post titles beneath a category name in the sidebar. It automatically displays posts in descending order from the most recent post to the oldest posts. To change this order, you need to edit the cat-posts.php file in the category-posts plugin directory in the plugins directory.
I promised my friends I'd start documenting all my little Wordpress hacks as I went along, so we'd both remember how to do things. Of course, I've done this before but had to Google yet again to get the answer, which was outdated for WordPress 2.8. A lot of people don't want the RSS Comments Feed and WordPress.org link in their Meta widget. Here's the default display:
