IMHO, the best way to bootstrap your OpenACS development efforts is to read through the code in the vanilla install.
Look at /news/index.tcl and see how the DB search is constructed and built into the html. Extract what you want of that into a /index.tcl home page (or /index.adp if you prefer that--I personally prefer to build all pages as .tcl and then send 'em to a template) along with the other stuff you want. In this fashion, you can embed various modules (news, bboard stuff, etc etc) into any page you want.
The existing code (in 3.2.5) is rather confusing and not optimally documented, but that just means that when you figure it out, you'll really understand it!
HTH.
