Hey Philip.
No need for an extension. This can be done out of the box. Just add something like "{{Special:RecentChanges/10}}" to your page and the last 10 recent changes will be displayed. More special pages are includable, by the way.
I made a tiny test page[1].
Cheers! Siebrand
[1] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Siebrand/test
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- I would like to display some of the more recent changes on the mediawiki main page that users's first see. I was thinking that I would have to write an extension to do this, and base my code upon whatever the Special:Recentchanges page is doing.
Is this a reasonable belief? Would you do it differently?