Is it possible to make a Category page the homepage in magento?

magento, php

Solution

You can just add this to any CMS page (substitute the category ID that you want to display - you can find that in Admin->Catalog->Manage categories):

 {{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="8" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}

Problem

I would like to display a catergory page as my homepage rather than a CMS page as it seems to be difficult to get a CMS page to properly display items. I have gone to Url rewrite Management and created a url-rewrite for a category Then gone to System|Configuration|Web|Default Pages| and changed Default Web URL to my new url-rewrite from cms but I get a 404 error when I go to the root of my site. Is there a way to redirect the root to a category rather than a CMS page?

Original source