There can be much more specific CSS and PHP involved in doing that than I care to expand here. Basically, assuming you just want code from a single normal loop, I’d start by add a class called indexpost
to the default theme’s style.css:
.indexpost {
display: block;
float: left;
width: 200px;
height: 500px;
}
Then in the theme index.php file, replace this:
<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
</div>
With this:
<div class="indexpost" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
</div>
This probably won’t look very good, but it’ll get you started.
What it does is basically change the way that posts are styled on your index (home) page. It makes the elements into free-floating boxes (blocks) with a specified width and height and then tells them to try to float to the left. What that does is gives you two boxes per line (that’s all that will fit), and then gives you two more in one line, etc. The change from the_content to the_excerpt is a modest attempt to keep the text from overflowing the specified height of the boxes.
Hope all that helps.