Help with static blog page

Look at the dashboard, settings, readings. You can select what page opens first. You do not have to change any files.

I have set my home page as my first static page and added a link to a blog page (busy reading google & other forum posts ) Now have posts showing but no forward next buttons etc & no posting box

do I post another question about these ?

Hi TonyaOD,

If I am not wrong are you looking for this kind of page.
https://www.abode-valley-avoa.org/blog-spot/

This page is a separate blog page used to display all the posts at one page with excerpt. For this you will need to create a custom page template. you can create something like this:

<?
/* Template Name: Blog Page Template */

?>

<?php
/**
 * The template for displaying all pages.
 *
 * This is the template that displays all pages by default.
 * Please note that this is the WordPress construct of pages
 * and that other 'pages' on your WordPress site will use a
 * different template.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Twenty_Ten
 * @since Twenty Ten 1.0
 */

get_header(); ?>

		<div id="container">
			<div id="content" role="main">

			<?php
			/* Run the loop to output the page.
			 * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file
			 * called loop-page.php and that will be used instead.
			 */
			get_template_part( 'loop', 'page' );
			?>

			<div id="allevents" class="bloglatestposts">
			<?php if (function_exists('yg_recentposts')) { ?>
			  <ul>
			    <?php
				$parameters = array(
			    'limit' => 20, //Number of posts to show
			    'excerpt' => 200,  //excerpt length (letters)
			    'afterexcerpt' => '...',
				'afterexcerptlink' => 1,
				'separator' => '<br /><br />',
			    'actcat' => false, //get posts current category
			    'cats' => '12,13,14,15,16,17',  //Categories to get posts
			    'cusfield' => 'thumbnail', //custom field name of thumbnail image
			    'w' => 110,  //width
			    'h' => 110, //height
			    'firstimage' => true,  //get first image of post content
				'showauthor' => 1,
				'showtime' => 1,
				'format' => 'M d,Y',
				'spot' => 'spot2',
			 	'atimage' => false,  //get first attached image of post
			    'defimage' => 'https://localhost/abode/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/calendar.png', //default thumbnail image
			    );
			     yg_recentposts($parameters);
			   ?>
			  </ul>
			<?php } ?>
			</div>

			</div><!-- #content -->

		</div><!-- #container -->

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

@HRanjan: That won’t work. Its theme-specific and contains references to custom function.

@tonyaod: Have you tried switching to the Twenty Eleven theme to rule out any theme-specific problems? How many posts-per-page have you configured in Settings -> Reading? How many posts have you published?

thanks for the heads up. I looked for some help on creating a template & worked through it until i had what i wanted
link to easy adaptable wordpress loop template tutorial

this was great – i added a few extras like category filter but it now works fine