minifrontpage feature

Hi zaheedeen, there's no option to choose specific articles directly, but there are workarounds for that. And yes, you can select article by tags. You can also filter articles by showing only featured article or you can also showing article form specific author.
https://www.dropbox.com/s%2Frgk8cw4cdp3igw2%2Fmonosnap%25202021-05-10%252018-34-20.png?raw=1

So is the select article by tags not part of the free version?

Filtering by Category, Tag and also Featured articles are all part of free version. So if you only need those features then it looks like the free version is enough for you.

The featured article workaround is ok, but will be too lengthy for me as I want specific articles to appear on certain months, for example if it's a vacation week then I want articles to do with vacations to appear .. to feature these every time will be time-consuming...

I don't know the structure of your content but if you want to, you can combine featured article with tag + module publishing option. So you can show featured articles those have tag : vacation, to be displayed in 1 Dec 2021 to 1 Jan 2021. You can create multiple modules and schedule it to be published in different time range

What version do you have?
Tag option is added in Version 3.1.0
www.templateplazza.com/items/mini-frontpage-joomla-module