Front Page Picture
To add a fancy front page picture, look to your right while you are composing or editing your post. Under the “Post” tab (instead of Block), scroll down near the bottom. You’ll see a “Featured Image”. Click on it and upload a picture as your featured image.
They need to have (or activate) a reply count/new reply on the front page posts.
Yea, that would be useful. See if there are plugins for that…
OK. Basically I have to find a different theme to change the entire layout to have comment counts show up. It seems to work now.