Was looking for a way to add a New Products section to the homepage of a Magento store I’m working on a found a great write up on Richard Castera’s blog. All you really have to do is add this code to the homepage code in your CMS section:
{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage"template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}
Check out the full blog post with some great back and forth and troubleshooting tips.
Once you have the new products displaying, this post on the Magento site will show you how to have more than five products displayed and how to add more than one row.