I would like to show one of my news items to be the top of the frontpage to override any newer items that I might publish in the future, how can that be accomplished in Mambo? 

This is not very obvious at first for what I was trying to do but I figure out how it was done!

You will need to a few tweaks:

1. Set the "Home" in the menu manger as follow:

+ Set "Category Order:" to "order by primary only"

+ Set "Primary Order:" to "Frontpage ordering"

2. In the "Frontpage manager" you can tweak the "order" column to whatever ording that you want then the frontpage will show the content in that order. 

For example: I would make the content that I want to always be the first on the list to have a negative number on the "order" column so any future item will always list below it.

You might need to tweak it a few times to do what you want but it is doable.  It will take time to get it the way you want.

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