I <i>n</i>th doing a local install of MODx with the sample content (I used MAMP on my powerbook; google around for a pre-built *AMP stack for your OS of choice). Looking at how things are done in the templates has been incredibly useful to me.
I could attempt to describe at length how to set this up, but I haven’t yet gone through creating a document for adding news entries on the web (so far I’m adding entries through the manager) so I’d be missing a few crucial steps that you’d want. However, if you dissect the sample dataset in combination with the Ditto documentation you should be able to work out how it works.
In short, for the display end: First, create a new Chunk. This’ll be the template that determines how Ditto displays your news items. Use Ditto-specific placeholders (the list is at
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Ditto_Placeholders) to tell Ditto where to put the relevent items.
Next, create your news documents. You’ll want one new document to serve as the "folder" / "base" here (I’m not sure what the official MODx term is, but its the document ID you’ll point Ditto to, and its children will be the documents Ditto displays). I don’t know about creating a web frontend to add new news yet, but for now you can add a couple of new documents as children of your base.
Now, on your frontpage, insert a [!ditto!] placeholder. Use the parameters from
http://modxcms.com/ditto_parameters.html. The most important ones are &startID, which you should set equal to the ID of your "base" folder, and &tpl, which should be the name of the chunk you created to serve as a template.
Sorry this is so cursory, but hopefully it’ll get you looking in the right direction.
