When we renamed home to home_original we thought we were doing a good thing. However, now when we make modifications to the home page in the CMS, we save and publish those changes, but the changes are never live. If you look at the code of the page, you can see the changes we made, but again, those changes are never shown in the browser to the public. We CAN see those changes in a SS preview of the page, but never on the live site. Again, even though the code DOES show the changes. So we are pretty sure this occurred when we decided to rename the home page, but w are not 100% certain. If that is the case, how do we recover from this ?

As far as I know SilverStripe requires a page with a URL Segment of 'home' to be displayed as the website's index page. If you change the URL Segment (e.g. to home_original) SilverStripe will no longer consider it to be the home page and I think it will create one for you. If you look at your site tree you may have a new page called Home that is now being displayed as the website's index page.

If this page exists, try deleting it then revert the URL Segment of your original home page back to 'home' and save and publish.