Wow this feature will make PQA really more awesome.
What I will add is this,
1.Featured threads
2. Popular threads
3. Popular answers
4. Sites stats ;
Tottal number of threads
Total number of users
Total number of replies/comments
etc
Assuming people would want to turn off closed site plugin,
We can give them options for custom header and footer on Homepage
options to output various widgets on homepage
etc
Examples of site with such designs?
1.https://www.funadvice.com/ (closed site design)
2.http://www.askdeb.com/ (open site design)
4.http://www.experienceproject.com/
5. https://www.chegg.com/study (closed design site)
6. http://www.brightstorm.com/
7.http://zhidao.baidu.com/
6.http://www.avvo.com/
On implementation,
Short Code Api is very user friendly while Rest API is developer friendly.
We need both. In order of priority, Short code API should first followed by Rest API
Another option is Wigetization where we build several widgets that we can select to appear on hompage. We can widgets for almost anything