Curating the homepage Learning Craft currently. Wondering if there's any plugin that simplifies the curation of the home page by allowing pinning a post, highlighting a post, reordering a post etc (non chronologically)

Here's a reference of a equivalent Wordpress plugin:
https://github.com/10up/curator

THanks
You could create a matrix content field for the homepage with a child entry selection field. You can add as many matrix blocks as you'd like, and select the entries you would like within them. 

You can read more about Matrix fields here.

Likewise you can checkout entry field types here.

So your code for index.twig might look like:

{% for block in entry.calloutBlocks %}
  &lt;article&gt;
    {{block.title}}
    {{block.body}}
    &lt;a href="{{block.url}}"&gt;Read more&lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;/article&gt;
{% endfor %}