I was working today on a new template for tt_news and I decided I should see how the LIST and LATEST views looked using different news records.

I usually do this by changing the value of listStartId to different numbers so that tt_news will show a different news record every time the listStartId has changed.

Well, I found myself stumped when my changing the value of listStartId had no effect on which news record my LIST and LATEST views displayed first.

Then after some thinking and some searching, I found out the reason why listStartId wasn't working, and the easy solution came as a result.

Sure enough, in the tt_news docs, it says:

If "excludeAlreadyDisplayedNews" is enabled "excludeLatestFromList" and "listStartId" will be ignored. <ref>ben van 't ende: tt_news, ben.vantende.net/t3docs/tt_news/page/7/ (last visited Sep. 25, 2009).</ref>

So that's it. All that has to be done is to set excludeAlreadyDisplayedNews = 1 and then listStartId will work again.

I was so glad to find that out.