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>The Category Column is mainly designed to give your blog a bit more of a newspaper behaviour. E.g. The plugin shows the latest posts from all categories with an offset of three posts (which are in the main column) on our homepage.</p>
<p>If there is a post thumbnail, it will be displayed above the headline of the post. No further text will appear. If there is no thumbnail, only the headline and the excerpt of the post will be shown. When the plugin can detect neither the thumbnail nor the excerpt of a post, it will display just the first couple of sentenses (or words) of a post.</p>
<p>The Category Column was tested up to WP 4.5. It should work with versions down to 2.9 but was never tested on those.</p>


Category Column

The Category Column does simply, what the name says; it will show excerpts of the latest posts in your sidebar.

WP Auto Columns vs Category Column