What does this code mean?

Don’t put any links in your chunk template. Whatever you put in the chunk template, that is what Ditto will display. The chunk should have all of the HTML framework, and just the placeholders for the data you want from the news item.

You can tell Ditto to display some text from one or more random news items.

The placeholders can be any of the document’s fields, such as pagetitle, introtext (summary) or even the content. And that’s only the beginning. It’s very flexible.

For example:

<div class="news-headline">[+longtitle+]</div>

Style the news-headline class to have a bit of padding and margin at the bottom and with a bottom border, and you’d have a very nice little block. Set the Ditto parameter &display=`3` and it would do this for 3 news items.

<div class="Nieuws2">
Hier komt het laatste nieuws.</div>

[[Ditto? &startID=`2` &tpl=`Nieuws2`]]

Ok, we have a misunderstanding here.

If you just want some arbitrary text, not from any of your news articles, then just put the text after the news button in your template. Or make a chunk with it, and put the {{chunkName}} tags where you want it. That has nothing at all to do with Ditto.

Ditto is for displaying bits of individual news articles. (I wonder if the author ever used a real Ditto machine...the original hand-cranked version).