There is an activity page (which is switched off right now) which lists every event in the community in date order (but NOT forum posts). It works well with the groups (which we dropped a few years ago), blog and comments, but given the current areas of the site, it seemed largely pointless.
The updates pane (near the top on the right column) is supposed to link to each post in order (with the new post count reducing each time you click). It’s never been reliable, but I’ve never found a replacement.
User photo posts may have to go or be controlled in some other way anyway. If users post things they shouldn’t, it might be hours before I find out and, in the meantime, I can lose my billing service or even the entire site.
I’m not sure I understand the homepage comment. The homepage is the blog. That is dynamically generated. I’ve tried to surround it with links etc. to the forums and other content in the site.
There’s no way to add photos to blog comments.
The current forum system is the one created for the site script (so works best) but it is fairly basic. I’ve tried 4 different forum systems over the years. The more advanced ones are a lot harder to set up and administer and usually have problems of their own. The one currently in use was the only one which worked with the permissions system (which makes the Community Supporter thing possible).
My main complaint about the current system is complexity. It’s enormous, options all over the place in over a dozen plugins and very hard to maintain. Every time there are updates to those plugins we gain or lose compatibility problems. There are a few plugins I would love to add but they just don’t work with the current mix.