So after flitting across the internet, I’ve come across the following that may be relevant: exclude certain categories, include certain categories. Can you think of a way to include one category on the left and one on the right (on this page)?
Neil´s last [type] ..Did God create the world and everything that exists

You would need to get into some custom code to do this: either by writing a custom home page such as this example of Home page customization or my overriding the home() function in a custom loop as described on DIY themes.

There is possibly a third approach where you run the two queries, one for each caetgory, merge the results into a single set and pass that as the “wp_query” to the standard Thesis home page. This would of course cause a problem if you did not have a enough posts in either category as the posts would end up on the wrong side. However if you have the same number of posts returned for each category it would be fine

Regards

Russell

The Practical Analyst site uses the wp-clear-basic premium theme which has a magazine style for the Home Page.

My approach to this would NOT be to hack the thesis_loop function: I can think of three ways of trying to do this where the amount of work and the level of control both reduce as you proceed down the list:

1. Create a custom page template that calls query_posts() for each category and grabs the 5 most recent posts you want to feature – with a custom template you have complete freedom of layout
2. Create a static page for the home page and embed an RSS feed for each category that reads the 5 most recent posts form that category – some simple html around the RSS feed content will produce the required two column layout
3. Replace the normal home page query by a query_posts() call that returns all the posts you want in the correct order(the full posts first followed by the teaser posts with an even number of teasers in each category to make things simpler) and use the thesis_hook_before_content, thesis_hook_after_content and thesis_hook_before_teaser_box hook to inject the category headings and make the content box into two columns with the teaser box reduced in width using CSS.

I have a client who is planning to move to a magazine style home page in the next couple of months when they have a least 40 items of content of their site. I will use one of these approaches listed above and then report on this blog how I got on. I suspect I will use the second approach which uses RSS as this allows the various magazine sections to include material other than local articles such as tweets, photos from Flickr, news, etc.

Please check out http://www.wordpresswise.com/three-teasers-per-row-without-hacking-thesis-405 for the jQuery solution that involves no changes to Thesis files.