grab the latest title from a category to put on the front page?

I think the Opt-in front page plugin for WordPress does what you want:
https://www.semiologic.com/software/opt-in-front/

Alternatively you could use:
The WordPress Category Posts Plugin could help you get your lists of categories
https://watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-category-posts.html
or the List Posts in a Category plugin:
List Posts in Category Plugin:
https://www.chris.narrabilis.com/wp/wordpress/posts-in-category/
and then you could use the loop on your front page to display that list:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page#Integrating_WordPress

I have a follow up question to the first one asked, I am using this code to pull the last 4 full posts with their header and content onto my front page (which is outside of my blog directory):

<?php
$how_many=4; //How many posts do you want to show
require_once(“/path/to/config/paranews/wp-config.php”); // Change this for your path to wp-config.php file ?>
<?
$news=$wpdb->get_results(“SELECT ID,post_title,post_content FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_status= \”publish\” ORDER BY ‘ID’ DESC LIMIT “.$how_many);
foreach($news as $np){
print (“<h2><a href=\””);
echo get_permalink($np->ID);
print (“\”>$np->post_title</h2>”);
print (“$np->post_content”);
} ?>

My question is, how can I tweak the code so that it will only show the posts from a specific category (category ‘3’ in this case)?

I’m interested in this as well. I tried some plugins, but didn’t exactly what I needed. So if there is anyone who can solve this issue, then please!

the first post didn’t help me… does anyone have any other ideas?