Hi Edgar,

The 'posts by a specific author' has nothing to do with categories. You could fairly easy write a custom plugin for this. Therefore I am interested in the other things you would like to show. How do you envisage that? Only if you can find some common grounds you could think of "The Mother Of All List Plugins". Otherwise simply make a few custom ones.

Good luck

Afwas, thanks.

This particular example is one - in which - I manage a bunch of biographies. These "professional staff" are posts I want to link to. They are not "blog authors".

The category listing would be just a list of blog article titles on that category - not specifically "authors".

Does that help?

That's even more easy: you can do that in a FreeHTML widget, provided you have a category for each and every person.
What would a widget, in your opinion, add what a FreeHTML widget can't (I give you a clue: FreeHTML widgets can't access variables like author, date etc.)

Good luck

Right, that is what I have been doing. Except that, every time I add a person, I have to manually add his/her name to the HTML Widget. Thus, I thought, a category widget would be nice - something that would grow automatically.

I may play around with the category plugin and create one.

Now we're getting somewhere.
Start of with a new blog, that may be hidden from view, where you make a category for each and every person.
Now you can filter your categories by fact they exist on the new blog and create a widget showing only these categories.

For this idea to properly work you should allow crossposting among different blogs.

This sounds like the "linkblog" widget with an extra option to display only one category. Close? If so it MIGHT be an easy hack.