Load all nodes from content type on front page without views
I use the following code to retrieve all nodes of a type:

$type = 'example';
$query = db_select('node', 'n')
  -&gt;fields('n', array('nid'))
  -&gt;condition('type', $type)
  -&gt;condition('status', 1);
$nids = $query-&gt;execute()-&gt;fetchCol();
$nodes = node_load_multiple($nids);