For the record, I found a solution to this problem. It's using a small snippet of PHP code that's placed in the templates/tpl_index_default.php file.
Code:
<div class="wordpress">
<?php
// rss page from your blog -
$feed_url = "PUT WORDPRESS FEED URL HERE";
# INITIATE CURL.
$curl = curl_init();
# CURL SETTINGS.
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL,"$feed_url");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
# GRAB THE XML FILE.
$xmlTwitter = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
# SET UP XML OBJECT.
# Depending on your PHP version, use one of the lines below.
# Comment out the one you are not using.
//$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlTwitter);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlTwitter);
// How many items to display
$count = 1;
// How many characters from each item
// 0 (zero) will show them all.
$char = 200;
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
if($char == 0) {
$newstring = $item->description;
} else {
$newstring = substr($item->description, 0, $char);
}
if($count > 0) { ?>
<h2> <a href="<?php echo $item->guid ?>"><?php echo $item->title ?></a></h2>
<div class="entry">
<?php echo $newstring ?>... <br />
<a href="<?php echo $item->guid ?>">read more »</a>
</div>
<?php }
$count--;
}
?>
<!--/wordpress-->
</div>
I wish I could remember where I found this snippet of code so i could credit the author, but it works like a charm - pulls in the most recent post via the RSS feed and plops it right on the index page. Hope it helps someone else!