Just a couple questions

Q1: Yes.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/34752#post-223767

Q2. The problem is you could go a number of ways with this. Easiest would be to just create a Page as normal and edit it with each new news “entry.” Another more complex way would be to create a normal posting category for your news, exclude this from your blog’s home page, then either provide a redirect of a news Page to the category query with a plugin:

http://asymptomatic.net/wp/2005/03/22/1413/redirectify-plugin/

or set up a custom Page template that queries the posts from that category using query_posts(). Theres no doubt other ways to go about this, as well.

Your intentions are not clear.
As far as I can deduce it, the separate category would be an obvious choice. But if you do want to have in in a page you can do it. Just copy your index.php and rename it to whatever and paste the code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Whatever
*/
?>

according to Codex.

Now, create your Interesting News page and choose “whatever” as your template.
It will looks like your main page.
Next, create a new category e.g. “News” and note the id. Copy the following just under the previous code:

<?php>
query_posts('2');
?>

I use number 2 as an example!

You should write the news entries like regular post but they will show up in your “Interesting News” page like standard posts.

To exclude this category from regular posts just past the above code again, now in your index.php:

<?php>
query_posts(‘-2’);
?>`

Note the “-” sign!

This is all according to macmanx and Codex.

I tried it right now and it just seems to work.
Please correct if there is any mistake 🙂

Kassad’s approach works beautifully. How would I modify the code to exclude multiple categories from the index.php page?

I tried what Kassaf suggested, but the query_posts function seems to overwrite every page. For example, if I go to /page/2, I still see the most recent posts. Any ideas?

Oops.

Thanks for keeping me on track, moshu. 🙂