I’m pretty much a dabbler- there are really some beautiful Discourse styles out there but it takes some strong CSS and understanding of the workings of the platform. I did a lot of tinkering before the site was much used.
Thanks for the link to the Locations plugin, that one is new and we have had an interest in people being able to attach locations to profiles and creating maps from that.
The padlet was meant more as a one event activity and was not totally optimal, but after looking at several put your pin on a map services, I did not like their complexity or requirement to create accounts.
Here are some customizations from OEG Connect
Custom Components
These are the components I have added (via customize). I also have one for OEG that includes site specific CSS as well as some scripts (below) for modifying the home page
Brand Heather Theme Component - for the top menus meant to mirror the menus on other OEGlobal sites (@Mario helped with additional CSS)
DiscoTOC - For longer documents / pages I like this add on that put in the editor a menu item for a dynamic Table of Contents (appears on the right side) that is based on the posts heading structure (this means sometimes I am edoting other posts that use bold tags to mark headings, go with structural markup, folks, please!)
Social Share - This one provides a means to add more social media sharing services (I think I added LinkedIn)
Custom Hamburger Menu Links - Small but useful to put custom links in the 3 bar hamburger menu (which I suspect many people do not use)
Plugins
Discourse Tooltips (thanks to my colleague @IslaHF suggesting it) Provides a hover tooltip of posts from listing pages, helpful for previewing
Who’s Online (that’s another from Isla!) - this shows active users, we just added this for the conference and I like how it gives a sense of presences, plus it can enable person to person messaging. This is a favorite feature now (I changed the settings so it shows who was active in last 10 minutes rather than default 5)
Advertising Plugin - we did not get around to using it, and while it looks counter intuitive as we are not using ad services, the option for “House Ads” looked of use to display notices of things you want users to see. We did not have sufficient time to put it into use during the conference.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-advertising-ad-plugin-for-discourse/33734
Customizing the Home Page
This is what you were asking! I tried a few components and plugins for creating headers but was not really satisfied. I used this suggestion for customizing what appears just on the home page
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-custom-content-that-only-appears-on-your-homepage/131415
Disclaimer
Again, I am really more of an enlightened tinkerer than a discourse expert, and I get a lot of help and useful responses to questions from the Discourse forum