List of Forums as a block

this is cross-posted in module development, sorry, couldn't find a way to delete that post or reassign it to this forum

I'm ramping up on Drupal and have a "best practices" type question. I'd like to put the list of forums on the front page of a Drupal site and wondering the best way to do that. I considered adding a block to the forum module, but I know it's not a good idea to hack on files outside of the theme directory. Or, I can implement page-front.tpl.php in my theme directory, but I'm still learning about the process of writing custom snippets and the like to pull that data out.

Are there other options? Any advice is appreciated.