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 Post Widget is a fully customizable widget, that displays a single post. You can decide, whether or not the post thumbnail is displayed, whether the post title is above or beneath the thumbnail and a couple of more things. And of course, you can style the widget individually.</p>


Featured Post Widget

With the Featured Post Widget you can put a certain post in the focus and style it differently.

WP Auto Columns vs Featured Post Widget