On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki shows a way to have more than one paginated item on your page at a time (in a CakePHP application).

Many of you might have run into the problem of having multiple boxes on the same page that need to be paginated. For example you might have a left column with a list of members of your site and a right column that shows for a example a list of forums. Yeah, that's not the best example, but you get the idea.

The typical CakePHP pagination functional assumes that there's only one block of information that needs to be paginated per page. With Tim's modification, the model name for where the data is being pulled from is appended to the end of the URL and parsed by the script to know which is which.