Hi Laura,

You might want to post your XSLT so we can get a better idea of your problem, but to get a specific news item I believe you can add [#] to the end of your XPath filter.  Something like this might work:

<!-- Link to the second news item -->
<xsl:variable name="secondNewsItem" select="$currentPage/NewsItem [2]"/>
<a href="{umbraco.library:NiceUrl($secondNewsItem/@id)}">Next (<xsl:value-of select="$secondNewsItem/@nodeName"/>)</a>

<!-- Show the first news item -->
<xsl:variable name="firstNewsItem" select="$currentPage/NewsItem[1]"/>
<xsl:value-of select="$firstNewsItem/@nodeName"/>

Of course this assumes they are already in the order you want...are you wanting to sort them by date and get the most recent, or are they already ordered correctly in the node tree?

-Tom

After digging around, it seems like the renderTemplate feature would be ideal for my needs, but I can't get it to work. This is what I have, but it's not working (not picking up the first child node's ID and template and passing it on to the current page to display). I hard-coded the node ID and template ID into the renderTemplate macro to test it, and it works fine that way, but of course that won't work long term because the first child node will be different every time a newws story is added.

<xsl:param name="currentPage"/>
  <xsl:param name="renderFirstSubnode" select="/macro/renderFirstSubnode"/>

  <xsl:variable name="PageId">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="$renderFirstSubnode='true'">
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/node/@id"/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:when test="$currentPage/data [@alias = 'RenderTemplate']!=''">
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/data [@alias = 'RenderTemplate']"/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="/macro/pageId"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="TemplateId">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="/macro/templateId != ''">
        <xsl:value-of select="/macro/templateId"/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:GetXmlNodeById($PageId)/./@template"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:variable>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="string($PageId)!='' and string($TemplateId)!=''">
        <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:RenderTemplate($PageId, $TemplateId)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:text>An error has occured.</xsl:text>
        <br />
        <xsl:text>Please contact webmaster to resolve this error.</xsl:text>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>

Would this work? it sounds to me as though your renderFirstSubnode isn't returning anything

<xsl:variable name="renderFirstSubnode"select="$currentPage/node[position()=1]"/>

take a look at this post it may also help
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/developers/xslt/2834-Redirect-to-first-child-node-in-xslt

Thanks Rich! That worked well.. not exactly what I was planning on doing (wasn't planning on actually redirecting the page), but works just fine anyway.

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