List Category Posts is a WordPress plugin by Fernando Briano. List Category Posts allows you to list posts by category in a post or page using the catlist shortcode. When you’re editing a page or post, directly insert the shortcode in your text and the posts will be listed there.

The shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can also display the post author, date, excerpt, custom field values, even the content! A lot of parameters have been added to customize what to display and how to show it.

numberposts – Number of posts to return. Set to 0 to use the max number of posts per page. Set to -1 to remove the limit. Ex: catlist name=mycategory numberposts=10 You can set the default number of posts globally on the options page on your Dashboard in Settings, List Category Posts.

For more information on this plugin directory at the wordpress.org site. You can set which posts to show.