I'm confused. It has often been asked in the forums how to get news on the main page. The answer always was to set News as the module for the start page. That would mean that you see /modules/news/ as url though, but you can fix that with the shorturl hack (so http://www.domain.com/modules/news/ gets just http://www.domain.com as url).

That is what I thought I had learned from the forum. However, on the new xoops.org site I see that the main page has news! Is this a new feature? How has it been done?

XOOPS.org uses the spotlight module for its news block on the front page.

Ah, thanks :) I will try that module too then.