Latest News is really a special case of the Filtered Item List includelet. What it does is pulls out News Story items and puts them in a list on the page.

So the first thing to note is that it only shows pages of type News Story. Not regular pages. So when you create your news iten be sure to select News Story rather than Page.

It has some standard config options that are the same for most includelets:

Display mode - should it show as a panel or inline on the page.

Panel colour (if Panel mode selected) - optionally set the colour of the panel border.

Title - you don't need a title, but you might want to call it "Latest News" or something.

CSS class - unless you have your own custom CSS you can ignore this.

Inherit this includelet to subpages - should it just show on this one page, or show on all sub pages too.

The configuration options specific to Latest News includelet are:

Item - if you select an item on your site it'll only show News Stories from this folder or section of the site. Don't select the news item itself - select the folder that contains lots of items. This could be the home page if you want it to show News Stories from anywhere on your site.

Time period - only show news stories published within the given time period.

Max # of items - how many to show in the list.

Extra display options - you can enable some extra bits to display in the list (e.g., a read more link for each item).

Sort order - newest or oldest stories first.

I should put all this in the documentation, I know! Hopefully this helps!

You can do all this and more with Filtered Item List, if you want even more control over how to show links to items on your site. e.g., showing them in a grid with pictures.

Cheers

Joe