The great - and terrible - thing about jumping headfirst into an open source product like this is that there's a mountain of information out there to help you, but finding exactly what you're looking for is really tough.

This page contains what I've learned about setting up a plone site for the benefit of others in the same leaky boat.

Where to Save News Items?

News items can be saved anywhere in a Plone site (as can docs of any type). The difficulty I ran up against is in getting a link to the News folder in the Navigation slot that behaves just like the tab at the top of the page. That's because it seems that the tab links to a dynamically-generated directory of news items that displays the news with little summaries and "more" links - just as you'd want.

But because it's not an actual directory, you can't just put a link in the Navigation slot that points to it... sure, you can create an actual News folder at the root of the Plone site, but then both links put you in a directory that just lists the contents and doesn't show them as news summaries.

I've had a look at dozens of Plone sites, and most are content to do just that. In the end, I took the middle road. I set up a directory at the root called newsitems, where all news stories will be stored. So there's now a link in the navigation slot which links to a directory listing of the events in that folder, while the tab at the top still displays them properly.

Not a perfect solution, but at least the breadcrumbs are correct, and all the news is easy to get at one way or the other.