Custom HomePage

Hello,

I have looked into a lot of material on this subject, but I think I am still missing something important. I have a wordpress blog that I want to set-up a custom Home Page on.

My plan was to make a page in wordpress, and then make that page that static homepage. I have the phpcode plug-in in so I was putting something like <phpcode></phpcode> into the page and then adding my code in-between.

I was trying to use the get_posts() function, in order to list the last 5 post’s title and permalink.

It seems thought that this will not work, and that this code was meant to be used in a template file. Is there anyway to acheive this via a word press page posting?

Thank You.