I was handed this site to fix. It was delivered without a functioning blog page, in fact, the links in the header were hard coded in the header.php file and they left a # where links should go, including the blog.
I noticed in reading settings, static home page was set to a particular page, in which the html and divs were entered into the edit box. But, when I look at index.php, I noticed that the same exact html is hard coded within it. I am assuming they had it set to the default, home as showing the latest posts, then hard coded in what is now the static home page content.
Anyway, I created a Blog page within WP, changed the posts page to the brand new Blog page and ... nothing.
Now, one of the critical underlying issues here is that this theme should be a child of twentyeleven but it was not set up that way. It appears that someone just copied all of the files of twentyeleven then modified them, named it the new website name and there you have it. If that plays into the reason why I can't get the blog page to work, I don't know.
But, here is what I have done, with some progress:
1) I made a copy of index.html, renamed it blog-template.php and added the
/* Template Name: Blog Template */ at the top.
2) went to my new blog page and selected Blog Template from the dropdown.
3) I cleaned out unnecessary html code from the blog-template.php and pasted in the loop code, which was missing from the original hacked up index file.
4) Now here is where the child theme plays in. The page was blank, up until I changed the loop code from <?php twentyeleven_content_nav( 'nav-above' ); ?>
to <?php theinnrosehall_content_nav( 'nav-above' ); ?> as well as the <?php theinnrosehall_content_nav( 'nav-below' ); ?>
The sidebar widget content is now filling the whole page, yet still no posts. I was happy to have made some progress, but this site is really way more messed up than I had thought.
Here is the link to the blog page: http://innatrosehall.com/our-blog/
Thank you to anyone who can help with this!