Andrey Ovcharov

<p>You need to display your articles in magazine or newspaper style. Use this plugin. You don’t have<br />
to change your theme files or add styles – just use “table” splitter.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>fully automatic splitter;</li>
<li>create columns in table or div’s;</li>
<li>tag-aware;</li>
<li>splits long paragraphs and unordered lists;</li>
<li>keeps text with headers;</li>
</ul>
<h4>Requirements</h4>
<p>The plugin requires DOM API (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php) and Tidy (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.tidy.php)</p>
<h4>Usage</h4>
<p>Wrap block of text with <code>[auto_columns]...[/auto_columns]</code> shortcode. It will produce markup like</p>
<pre><code><div class="auto-columns-container columns-2">
<div class="auto-columns-column column-1 first-column">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</div>
<div class="auto-columns-column column-2 last-column">Nam tincidunt gravida dui, at bibendum nisl lacinia nec.</div>
<div class="auto-columns-clear"></div>
</div>
</code></pre>
<p>In your theme use <code>do_shortcode</code> function:</p>
<pre><code><?php echo do_shortcode('[auto_columns]' . $content . '[/auto_columns]'); ?>
</code></pre>
<p>You will have to define width for <code>.auto-columns-column</code> class in your theme, of course.</p>


WP Auto Columns

Wrap block of text with shortcode. It will be split into columns. Automagically.

tepelstreel

<p>Yet another recent post widget. It shows the last post of your blog, where and how you want. You can define, on which pages of your site it shows and whether you want to show a post thumbnail or not. Decide, whether the links go to the post, to the attachment page or simply to a file. You can style the links in the plugins settings and each widget container differently.</p>
<p>The plugin was tested up to WP 4.5 and should work with versions down to 2.7 but was never tested on those.</p>


A5 Recent Post Widget

With the A5 Recent Post Widget you can put your latest post in the focus and style it differently.

WP Auto Columns vs A5 Recent Post Widget