Blog posts to display as full width template

[rochelle]

Background
I am using Church theme 4.0 with Wordpress 2.9.2.

I want to ‘de-blog’ the presentation of the posts on the homepage in such a way that the final landing page of the posts (a) displays as full width (b) does not display right hand sidebar, date, comments, tags or any other blog like element.


Solutions
I have researched this problem and see the potential solutions as being

1. Edit pageblog.php so that

<div id="contentleft"> becomes <div id="contentwide">
<div class="postarea"> becomes <div class="postareawide">
<?php get_sidebar(); ?> gets deleted

As per thread http://www.studiopress.com/support/s...highlight=blog


2. Edit the homepage.php so that it reads from a page parameter and not a post. As per thread http://www.studiopress.com/support/s...ad.php?t=24880


Outcomes
Solution 1 did not work for me. As far as solution 2 is concerned - I know I have to remove the code below but unsure what I have to replace it with as each summary on the homepage needs to point to a different page (the content has been duplicated as a page as well).

<?php $recent = new WP_Query("cat=".get_theme_mod('featured_bottom')." &showposts=".get_theme_mod('featured_bottom_num')) ; while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>

Questions
1. Which of these two solutions is the better solution?

2. If I need to implement solution 2 - then what code do I need? Or with reference to solution 1 - what am I doing wrong?