Hi, I'm building my first site with ss. WooHoo!
I'm trying to figure out how I can insert a sidebar that displays the most recent blog posts.
I'll be doing this on the homepage only.

Thanks in advance!

hmmz
how many pages u wanna show in recent pages module?
what pagetype u use for the pages??

I have used the latestnews module functionality

@SSTN - an example of that is part of the tutorials http://doc.silverstripe.org/tutorial:2-extending-a-basic-site#showing_the_latest_news_on_the_homepage

Willr, Thanks.
Does this apply to the Blog Module? That's what I'm using.
I'm not a coder, so I just get by, and I can't figure this out.

It can be applied to anything. If you want to show the latest Blog Entries these are under the classname 'BlogEntry' so simply adapt that function to

function LatestNews($num=5) {
  return DataObject::get("BlogEntry", "Date DESC", "", $num);
}

Then in the template you can use <% control LatestNews %>$Title, $Content...<% end_control %>.

Thats how to build it using custom controls. If you have a sidebar already filled with widgets you could use a widget like http://silverstripe.org/blog-links-widget/

Aha! Nevermind. The instructions in the tutorial worked fine. I was just misunderstanding how to properly flush the cache to see the change.
Thanks!