Combine recent and popular items in Views
You can create two separate views which will display two 2 popular items and  2 most recent items and use script below that will print content from these views on the page.

for ($i = 0; $i &lt;= $n; $i = $i + 2) {
  $popular = views_get_view('popular');
  $popular-&gt;set_display('block');
  $popular-&gt;set_offset($i);
  $popular_content = $popular-&gt;preview();
  print $popular_content;

  $recent = views_get_view('recent');
  $recent-&gt;set_display('block');
  $recent-&gt;set_offset($i);
  $recent_content = $recent-&gt;preview();
  print $recent_content;
}