BuddyPress.org

Sorry I just keep replying to myself. After I typed it out, I saw what I had been missing for the hours that I looked at it. Adding my solution for others who may be trying to do something similar.

I’ll probably clean up how this is implemented later, but in home.php, edit ‘index.php’ to read something like ‘custom.php’. Then, create custom.php with whatever HTML you want, then upload it to your sever. You can include the template the same way as always, by calling the header/footer and using the proper divs. Then, in settings, select “Blog Posts” to display on the home page. Now your homepage should render using whatever code you dumped into custom.php.