I am currently setting up a site, where I'd like to have a section on the main page with headlines, linking to a reverse-chronological list of "What's New...". This isn't for a 'portal' site, so I don't want that to be the main page, but would like to have a smaller block along the side or bottom with announcements.
A main goal is to give the site editors a consistent and easy way to add new announcements to the site. I don't want or need users to be able to comment on these announcements - this is strictly one-way communication.
There seem to be several ways to do this, but I'm not sure which is best.
I could have the editors write blog entries for this purpose, and the new entries could be shown on the main page using the "Recent Blog Posts" block. If I did this, though, I'd definitely want to change the block label to "What's New..." or "Announcements". It doesn't seem possible to change that through the admin menu, and I haven't been able to figure out where the label "Recent Blog Posts" comes from, even after doing a full grep search of my Drupal installation - where would I change that? The phrase shows up in /modules/blog.module, but if I change the text there the page won't load at all, so I'm guessing its more complicated than that.
Another option would be to set up a restricted forum that only the site editors could post to called "Announcements" or "What's New...", and then have a "New Forum Topics" block like on the Drupal site (again, changing the name for the block if I can figure out where the label comes from).