Article Order in Article Suggestions

I'd really like to be able to alter the order that the article titles appear in. Ideally there would be options for sorting the articles by created, published, joomla order, hits, rating, etc.

In particular, the tab "Articles in this Category" only those the first articles in that category. Since that will never change, that tab will always be the same - and often, it becomes useless. In some categories, the first articles might be years old and irrelevant now.

So I"d at least like to be able to reverse that and show the latest articles in the same category. I don't know if or when these changes can be made, but until then is it possible for me to edit the code so I get the latest articles instead of the oldest articles? I can't write PHP from scratch, but I'm not afraid to edit it and do so frequently when I need an extension to do something a little different for me - but I just can't see what to change myself. I'm guessing I need to change the SQL code, and I'm not as familiar with that.