Best practice for implementing a blog page / section in wp_menu_nav()

Question

I currently have a theme I am developing and had a thought on best practice. I am using wp_menu_nav() for my menus and they are linking to 4 or 5 pages respectively. I would like to add a page / to this menu but do not want to add a specific template to list the blog posts, in addition I do not want the user going to edit a page called blog with no content in it.

What is the best way to implement a page with all blog posts to the current wp_menu_nav(). This seems simple to me in theory but I want to make sure I am using best practice for this.

Open to hearing how you would go about this.

Thanks in advance,

JN

Answer 1

I ended up figuring out a solution to this issue even though it was not exactly what i was looking for. In Settings -> Reading there is an option to set the posts page to a specific page.

What I did was.

1. Create a new page with my base page template.
2. Add this page to my main menu in the admin (Appearance -> Menus)
3. Configure this page to be my posts page (Settings -> Reading)

Answer 2

Blog posts are not pages, they are posts. The default 'post' loop is usually considered the "blog" and I consider it the best practice to keep it that way. Any other post "types" or loops should be based on a CPT or category/tag/taxonomy/widget/query/whatever.

The alternative solution that is sometimes used is to create a category called "blog".