How can I make home.php (or other custom page) web site's default page? That could be done with .htaccess file of your root project. In this file you can specify which file will be shown first and what is the preferred order. Here is an example:
DirectoryIndex home.html index.html index.htm index.php
Just put home.php (or another) first, it can be the only one file or multiple. If there are several files, like we have in the example, browser will try to load first home.html then index.html...