Lifestyle home page customization

[SmockLady]

I can not provide a link as I am developing this offline on my computer right now. But I am using Lifestyle as the base of the design.

I want to customize the home page so that I can call the loop AND use the widget sections already built in. I can comment out the line remove_action line from the home.php file like this
//remove_action( 'genesis_loop', 'genesis_do_loop' );

but I want to do more than this. It's not so simple for me, I'm complicated.
I want to be able to control the home page loop separately from the settings in either Genesis or WordPress. Is there a way to create a loop that will show only one post and exclude 3 different categories from this loop?

When I use the Genesis settings to exclude a category that category is excluded from all the blog/archive/category pages and I only want it excluded form the home page. This is why I was thinking of creating a secondary loop strictly for the home page.

I am thinking the Grid Loop might help with this but I don't know how to customize it to exclude categories. I also don't know how to incorporate the Grid Loop code into the home.php file and still have use of the widgets. Does the Grid Loop go in the home.php file or the functions.php file?

Also, I want to tell the main loop not to force a featured image if I did not set one (at least for one category). I want to create a project 365 photo category and I will only be posting and image for those posts and when they show on the blog/archive pages it looks silly to have a little feature image of the same photo to the left of the larger photo showing when there is no text at all.

Is anyone willing to handhold me through this?

[Kim Turcotte]

I am also looking to use the grid loop on the home page of the Lifestyle theme for the layout of content from different departments on my site, but if I change the home.php to the one listed in this tutorial, then I will lose the ability to have the different widgeted areas on the home page.  Is there a way to do both?

[Author]

Posts