functions for putting several sections on a single page

[Carlos]

basically i wanted to set it up so that you could create a blog page, and then all child pages under that could be pulled onto the home page as blog entries. additionally, i wanted to be able to mimick this functionality with other pages, so, for example, there would be a featured boxes page, and all sub pages within it could be pulled onto the home page as a featured box, aligned in a grid.

Some of these can be done with I18N Search, now that this plugin lets you search by parent.
I've been experimenting a bit with this.

Let's suppose your blog page has slug 'blog'. Install the plugin, then edit that page and paste this into the content:

(% searchresults order=date tags=_parent_blog HEADER="" DATE_FORMAT="%A, %d.%m.%Y - %H:%M" %)

For the second part (featured box, etc.), or if you want to further customize how this is displayed (though you can style it with css), you can do more with the help of components. See I18N Search custom rendering.