I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to do. Do you want to aggregate the latest x news items from a whole structure or do you want to create a treelike structure but skip a level?

Some general approaches are:

Use the PageTree control which allows you to display pages recursively from a specified root node. You can specifiy the number of levels, add filtering and sorting etc.

Use nested PageList controls (put a PageList in the ItemTemplate of the PageList and use <%#Container.CurrentPage.PageLink%> as the nested PageList's PageLink property). This would allow you to skip the intermediate "Category" level.

Use a SearchDataSource - Repeater combination. The SearchDataSource can be set to search for n items from a root node and it's SortOrder property can be set to sort by publish date. You can refine further by filtering for page type, menu visibility or custom filters.

I did my best trying to explain the situation but you sort of got it. I didn't get the methods you suggested to work as I wanted them to so I ended up creating a page list called clipList and went for this in the code behind.

PageList[] pl = new PageList[clipList.DataCount];

int i = 0;

foreach (PageData pd in clipList)
{
    pl[i] = new PageList();
    pl[i].PageLink = pd.PageLink;
    i++;
}

i = 1;

while (i <= clipList.DataCount - 1)
{
    pl[i].DataSource = pl[i-1];
    i++;
}

i--;

clipList.DataSource = pl[i];

I don't even know what I would expect that to do, it's like a chain of datasources? If I try to interpret things again, can it be said that you want to collect all grandchildren of a page and present the x latest? Here's a way that might work:

in OnInit, attach an event handler to GetChildrenCallback, like so:

clipList.PageLoader.GetChildrenCallback = new HierarchicalPageLoader.GetChildrenMethod(LoadChildren);

then implement the callback to get the grandchildren instead of the children (using Linq, can of course be done by looping instead):

private PageDataCollection LoadChildren(PageReference pageLink)
{
    var children = DataFactory.Instance.GetChildren(pageLink);
    var grandChildren = children.SelectMany(c => DataFactory.Instance.GetChildren(c.PageLink));
    return new PageDataCollection(grandChildren); 
}

You can also simply get the grandchildren from the PageReference and set the DataSource property of the pagelist rather than setting the PageLink property and letting it get the pages itself using the callback.

Creating several webcontrols for use in codebehind seems unnecessary unless it accomplishes something I don't get from the source code. But if it works... :)

What I wanted to do was collect all news from a few different news categories and present them in one list. The code above did that so I'm just gooing to stick to it and move on. Like you said, "if it works...". :) Thanks for the effort!