SOLVED
In case anyone else has this problem, here's where I found what I needed.
File: /nodebb/src/controllers/helpers.js
Methods: buildCategoryBreadcrumbs and buildBreadcrumbs
Editing those allowed me to get the behavior I was looking for. Although, I would be curious to know if there is a better way to do this without changing the source code.
I'm using the Persona theme, and I set the logo url in the ACP under Settings > General > Site Logo.
I defined the custom page using the nodebb-plugin-custom-pages plugin.
I set the homepage to point to Categories, but this seems to effect the site title separately from the logo.
I have set my forum's homepage to be a custom static page. I would like the site logo to point to this page, and for it to be 'home'. Setting this up in the ACP went fine.
However, I want the header breadcrumb of the forum to still point to 'Categories' at the root instead of the new home page.
I tried a grep -rl "breadcrumb" ./ to locate it, but I haven't been able to find where this is actually defined. Should I be looking at breadcrumbs.tpl in the theme I'm using? I'm fairly new to this, and not very familiar with the file structure of the software.
Is there a way to change this?
Thanks for any help!
EDIT (2015-11-07)
I got the site logo and the breadcrumbs working the way I wanted. I didn't realize you could set a custom url for the logo image. Now the logo goes to the custom home page and the breadcrumbs lead to the categories.
The problem is now limited to the site name next to the logo. It still leads to the categories page, but I want it to point to the home page like the logo image. I haven't found a way in the ACP to change this. Can I change it somewhere in the code?
SOLVED
Just in case anyone else runs into a similar problem, I was looking at the wrong api urls to get what I needed.
I needed to be getting JSON from the topic data, rather than category or post. Most everything is working now.
I have a forum called 'News' and I want to display the most recent topic from this forum on the home page. I've successfully done this with a jQuery script in the header of the custom home page.
The trouble is that the plugins I'm using that normally parse things like video and custom markdown in the posts don't interpret these things on the home page.
This means that a post might have video content embedded when posted that isn't displaying correctly when it gets pulled to the home page.
Does anyone have any advice on how to fix this? Should I just try to create new parsing scripts for the home page?
Thanks for any help! I'm new to Node.js and nodebb. It's gone pretty well so far, but I haven't been able to fix this issue on my own.