I created a custom post type to separate a specific kind of post (with custom fields) from the regular blog posts. But I was struggling to find a way to list the available custom post entries in a sidebar and had not found any plugins with the flexibility and formatting control that I needed.

With this plug-in I was able to create 8-10 lines of shortcoding in a custom HTML widget that listed the most recent posts, showed the date/author of each in a smaller font than the title and finished up with a pagination control allowing the user to scroll through all available posts.

Superb!