Getting front page blocks to show on redirected front page
My problem appeared to be with the Top Node module. Apparently, the views display it introduces redirects in a way that causes the &lt;front&gt; tag not to work as it should. The answer is actually quite simple, and honestly makes the Top Node module seem a bit redundant. Although it's not intuitive to me, under "Row Style" on views, you can specify full node content, which, as the name implies, renders node results as they would appear if you typed in the URL directly. I simply made a view that returned one result, Row Style set to full node, and then created a page display at the URL "latest". Problem solved.