OK, so when you developed this theme, how did you imagine your customers should avoid having the same post ending up in both the Popular section and on top of the Gallery section? That is something one in general would not want, right?
My best idea is to fake the publish date of all my popular postings and set them one year back. But that’s not a good solution, since I plan to use it for events, and it looks confusing that an event is published before it happened. Another not so good solution is to only add old posts to Popular. That seems to be what you have done in your demo.
Any other ideas, please?