Combination splash page and recent post for the "home" page of the site

[jdhorner]

Hello all,

I'm new to Jekyll and Minimal Mistakes. (I've converted the blog from a Ghost blog I've been running for years, for a D&D group I run). Previously, my Ghost blog had something very similar to the Splash page layout from Minimal Mistakes. I'm looking to see if there's an easy way to do the following:

When you load the main site you see the splash layout, with a hero image and such, but always with the 3 most recent blog posts as the featured posts, and then after that, the 4th to N posts after, paginated like usual.

Is that even possible? I'm not certain how to make the 3 featured posts always be the three most recent ones. I think I can only "hard code" featured posts? I know I might be limited, as I'm using github pages to host everything. If it's not possible, that's fine. My fallback option (just to make the page feel "nice") would then be to investigate how I could use the regular "home" layout using "entries_layout: grid" with a hero image, if that's possible instead. I'm just not very good at understanding the documentation.

Thanks for any pointers or documentation you can share. I appreciate it very much!