That is static HTML. If you are looking for a plugin that displays topics as a blog post, you may be interested in nodebb-plugin-featured-topics-extended. Example here. https://forums.stonebound.net/
@psychobunny It has options to show/hide the title and render the title as a link to the post itself. So, yeah you can let people go comment on it, or really just make it look like a static piece of content on the site.
0_1447168085882_Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 7.04.49 AM.png
For more information about the brand new Widgets system, please have a look at this blog post.
For whatever it may be worth, the link to the blog post above is redirecting to https://nodebb.org rather than
the blog address presented upon pointer hover.