There seems to be a bug, or a conscious design issue, on the 'default.aspx' page when you create a Community Portal publishing site.
When you go to edit the page, the ribbon never shows up! Unraveling the code shows thats4-ribbonrow is hidden, but even after you unhide it (I use IE Developer Tools) nothing propegates inside the ribbon row. This issue is unacceptable to anyone wishing to customize this page. For instance, I want to have two content search web parts, one for Public communities and one for Private. Unfortuantely, there is a) no option to add a web part and b) no way to save the page after changes have been made.
This is a really upsetting issue as I'll have to re-create the Community Portal page myself (and figure out both where the External Display Templates live and how they work) which really defeats the purpose of having this as an option anyway.