I’ve also spent hours trying to solve a similar problem. I wanted to show 6 posts on the front page plus featured post and 10 posts on the other pages with no feature (and also using pagenavi plugin). I set up the blog to show 10 posts on the Options panel and added this code to my index.php before the loop:
if (get_query_var('paged') < 2){
include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/featured.php');
query_posts('showposts=6');
}
You can adapt the code to your needs. This works for me but I’m not a programmer, so if anyone has a better suggestion please let us know of it. ??
Edit: Oh wait, I just noticed the pagination on the first page is screwed up because it thinks there is 6 posts in every page so it shows more pages than they exist. =_= If I find a solution I’ll post it here.
