How do I fix this ?

Hm, instead of trying .htaccess to accomplish that, try this plugin instead: https://www.semiologic.com/projects/static-front/

Why not just use the home.php built-in feature?

What’s that ???

See the Template Hierarchy in the Codex. If you have a template called home.php in your theme it takes precedence over index.php and acts as an “intro” page (if you wish).

I have a question on the template hierarchy. If you have a home.php, how can you then view index.php? If I manually type out https://www.myurl.com/index.php, I get redirected to home.php.

What do you want to see on the index.php? (Actually it will be used if any of the other “special” templates is missing… )
Whether to use a plugin or the home.php depends on what exactly do you want to achieve.

Well, if you use home.php to create a splash page, then you’d want index.php to function normally, showing all your categories, etc.

Oh, you want a totally non-WP related splash? (not so “trendy” anymore ??
Anyway, in that case I don’t know.

Well, I don’t necessarily want that, I’m just curious. It could be a situation where I only wanted 1 category on the front page, and I wanted the template to look slightly different from the rest of the site (like a 3/2 column design, for instance), so I’d use home.php for this. I would then want to display the ‘normal’ blog page, and use index.php to do this. It’s essentially the same scenario I described earlier, but in this case the home.php makes use of WP. (BTW, sorry to hijack this thread, it wasn’t my intention.)

I wan’t “a totally non-WP related splash” like the one I’m using now (allaboutmadonna.com) but WP links don’t work… I tried static-front plugin but then it’s still using my WP template on that intro page