Help Query forum thread onto external page

[scubasteve3]

Bare with me as I have very limited programming knowledge. Basically I am trying to create a workaround to the frontpage CMS as it is somewhat limited.

What I was thinking was to create a specific hidden forum for threads that I want to be published to the frontpage. I would then copy the threads that users have posted and that myself or a moderator deemed appropriate for the frontpage into this hidden frontpage forum. A query would pull all threads from that forum onto an external page and put the threads into a list. So far this is no different than just clicking publish to the frontpage (in fact worse off). I have already written this code and am able to query and post the threads to an external page.

However, I want to be able to add an image thumbnail next to each bullet item. So it should look something like this:

Heading 1

• THUMBNAIL - Thread 1
• THUMBNAIL - Thread 2
• THUMBNAIL - Thread 3

Heading 2

• THUMBNAIL - Thread 1
• THUMBNAIL - Thread 2
• THUMBNAIL - Thread 3

My thinking was that you would want to write a code that would pull image 1, image 2, image 3, etc from your server for each thread so "published" on the frontpage. So the first thread you "published" would correspond to image 1 and the second to image 2 and so forth. Any ideas on how I would do this?

The one downside about doing it this way is that the query results link to the copied thread in my hidden forum and not the public one, any ideas on how to reroute it to the original?

Sorry if this is confusing, I am very stuck right now and getting frustrated...

Thanks for taking your time to read this!