You need to modify the template used to show these posts, or create a new one to replace it. You should create a child theme to do this sort of theme hacking. A typical home index template of course shows posts and excerpts, but not full content. You just need to change the excerpt output to full content output. You can set the post per page in admin settings to 5, or modify the related query var using the ‘pre_get_posts’ action.
If you are modifying the current template, it will be displaying pagination links. You can remove these if you do not wish visitors to see older posts from this page. The older posts can still be accessed through other queries that use the archive templates.
If you’d rather not hack your index template, you could create a custom page template based on it, then create a page based on this template. The permalink to this page is what is then used to show the five recent posts. If you want this to be your home page, you can specify so in admin settings.
I was thinking I want to create a blog template page, add 2 sidebars (one for twitter, one for facebook) then run my news feed down the middle of it… 🙂
A little googling and its complete – thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
