Understanding home.php and index.php

I’m preparing a candidate for Themeforest and I need to understand the musts about these two pages.

Knowledgebase says: “index.php should be reserved for standard blog “latest posts” view.”, but it doesn’t say anything about home.php so I taught I’m free to design home.php however I like.

Than I bought a very popular theme to understand the minimum criteria and saw that main.php of that theme is also a blog roll (and it’s not a blog theme).

Shortly, Am I free in home.php design?
Thank you.

Yes, index.php is used as a “failsafe” template when others aren’t provided e.g. category.php, archive.php or home.php

I always build using home.php for the latest posts and front-page.php for the homepage, and then give a basic design to the index.php incase it’s ever used.

2 Likes

Thanks for yor answer, I’ll also follow your way.

What confused me was that “popular theme” I purchased. It has no page which can output the design in the demo. So I taught that I’ll need to use shortcodes to build my homepage.