Is there a plugin for Wordpress that will give me access to something like Engadget's header with a mashup of images and post titles? Or any other format but basically 4-5 featured posts on top.
It is a custom "jQuery slider". There are plenty of those scripts around the net. Whether there is a plugin for it, doesn't matter, just code them into your theme files.
I can try that but what about Post thumbnails? Is there a method which gets an image thumbnail from the post? Any clue if YAFPP does that?
Post thumbnails? Or the new Featured Image feature in WordPress? I don't know what YAFPP does. You will have to read the docs on it and sees if you it uses the Featured Image. And, finding a plugin that use that feature along with the excerpt of the post is what you would want. One thing is, to be consistant, you need to maintain the Width/Height dimensions for all your featured images. Make sure the dimensions are the same size as the slider box. Make sure the featured images are optimized. Also, you need to be concise in your excerpts. They can only be x words long to fit in the caption area. If there is a WordPress plugin, they are few and probably will not be to your liking. I can tell you that right now. The best thing to do is Google for "jQuery slider" and view all the demos out there, of which there are many. You can probably adapt a WordPress plugin to use the jQuery slider that you found very easily with a little work. I did one for a site already, although I coded it into the actual theme.
There are a few plugins that can do this type of action. Engadget, however, rolled their own and it is used across multiple sites that are owned by their parent company (AOL) and ran off of the server at blogsmithmedia.com.