I just worked out a way to list Published folder contents, in a way that 
updates automatically when you publish additional Folder contents ( in a 
nutshell, a topic with appropriate criteria, with a shortName of 
"index_html" in folder foo)

The drawback is that this forces you to get to foo/folder_contents 
manually.

If there is a better way to do this, I'd be grateful for a pointer.

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To set up a folder (e.g.your home folder) to list its published contents 
by default (like a Directory View in Apache):

    * Go to the folder (you must have full rights to it) and click on 
the Contents tab (resulting path should end in "folder_contents")
    * Add a Topic item
    * set the shortName of the new Topic "index_html", and the Title 
something mnemonic as well, like "Published contents"
    * click Save
    * this should take you to the Criteria tab of the Topic
    * add the "Path" field name, with a Criteria Type of "String Criterion"
    * set the Path criterion field to the folder path, e.g. 
"/siteFolder/Members/berendes" (the first part will always be 
/siteFolder for this site - how things are stored internally. the last 
part you can take from the URL you see in your browser).
    * add the "review_state" field name, with a criteria type of "String 
Criterion"
    * set the review_state criterion field to "published"
    * click Save
    * set the state of index_html to Published

There is a significant drawback to this approach. It becomes difficult 
to get back to the full content listing for this folder - where you'd 
see all the items in the folder, and be able to add new items and delete 
old ones. Currently, you can do it by typing in the url manually, ending 
with folder_contents, e.g.

http://sitedomain.com/Members/berendes/folder_contents