After considering many different designs for how to set up a dynamic homepage and how to handle various templating and user information, I finally...
...took the easy way out and installed phpBB and a custom mod I had already created.
This means I can easily create new front page posts simply by posting stuff using the phpBB interface.
Yay! I guess.
This means that all the "existing" news posts are now marked as having been posted all today. I might get around to resetting the dates back to something more reasonable... but probably not. Honestly, it's not really worth the effort.
All times are GMT, by the way. You can always create an account and muck with the way dates are presented.