What's the best way to maintain templates for standard pages and a front page?
To avoid duplication, creating separate PHP files might work, but the best answer is to you do everything in your MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) function, in your template.php file.

MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
  if($variables['is_front']) {
    //set variables to X
  }
  else {
    //set variable to Y (or just leave them)
  }
}


Now you probably won't even need page-front.tpl.php

Also, if you are using page.tpl.php and/or page-front.tpl.php you do have the variable $is_front available