This was a lot more difficult than I anticipated. It seems having multiple while loops can confuse WordPress if it exhausts all the posts. In particular, if a while loop gets to the end of the posts, the next while loop starts from the beginning, causing duplicates to be shown.
To get round this we can use a (not very elegant) do_not_duplicate array to keep track of posts we have already displayed.
Here is my following solution. I’ve used a trick I’ve seen (using foreach) to make it flexible for creating more columns / altering the number of posts in each column. I hope the comments explain everything…
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : ?>
<?php
//Can have as many loops as we like - set how many to appear in each loop.
//In this example, 4 columns of length 1, 1, 4 and 5 posts respectively.
$post_counts = array(1, 1,4, 5);
foreach ($post_counts as $iteration => $max_count) {
$count = $max_count;
/* Give our column specific id/class for styling */?>
<div id="column-<?php echo $iteration+1; ?> ">
//Loop inside the column
<?php while ( have_posts() and $count-- ) :
the_post();
/* Check if post has already been shown */
if (in_array($post->ID, $do_not_duplicate)) continue;
/* If not, add it to our do_not_duplicate array and show it */
$do_not_duplicate[] = $post->ID; ?>
<a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/31855/<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="" ><?php the_title(); ?></a> </br>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>
<?php }?>
<?php else : ?>
<p>No posts</p>
<?php endif; ?>
This does the job, but there must be a neater way…?