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 Featured Category Widget is mainly designed because there were people for whom the Featured Post Widget was not enough. They wanted to put a category of their blog in the highlight.<br />
If there is a post thumbnail, it will be displayed above the headline of the post. If there is no thumbnail, the first picture of the post is taken. You can set the size for the thumbnail or just take the standard from your options. Decide yourself, whether you want to show the excerpt, saved with your post or just the first three sentences or the first twenty words of the post. Style the widget individually, ready.</p>
<p>The Featured Category was tested up to WP 4.5. It should work with versions down to 2.9 but was never tested on those.</p>


Featured Category Widget

The Featured Category Widget is basically a Featured Post Widget for a category.

WP Auto Columns vs Featured Category Widget