Static Master + Wordpress Master

Pinegrow WP WordPress
1

I have a static site that I built using Pinegrow and have a page called “master.html” that I use as the master template. I have several pages, like index.html, about.html, etc. Everything works great.

Now I am trying to create a wordpress theme out of this same master template so that I can incorporate a blog page on the site (in a subdirectory /news, and the goal is when you go to /news on the website, it shows the recent blog posts), but I can’t seem to work out the best way to do it. Here’s what I’ve tried:

  1. Use master.html as the wp-master
  • this generates a master.php file, but does NOT generate an index.php file, which makes the theme incomplete and broken. I can’t figure out how to get an index.php file generated automatically
  1. Move my site master template master.html to index.html and then use this as the wp-master
  • this seemed to work well, except then I’m not able to generate the /news page I want…it simply uses the content from my website’s index page (the home page) and I’m not able to generate a new page to act as the “index” for wordpress.
  • I tried just creating a new page, called “latest-news.html” using the index.html as the site master and wp-master. I was able to generate the wp code to display posts, but I can’t figure out how to tell wordpress to use this page as the main page and not the index page. It doesn’t show up as a “Page” nor can I find anyplace to use it as a template to create a new Page in wordpress to assign as the landing page of the blog
  1. Create a subdirectory called _wordpress and create an index.html file there which would be the wp-master
  • the goal here is to trick pinegrow into thinking this is the index.html that gets converted to index.php
  • because this file need to have the site master (master.html) so that it can get updates, it means i’m getter errors when trying to assign it as the wp-master, saying the component doesn’t allow me to edit the html attributes that pinegrow is trying to throw on there

Any advice? The internet doesn’t seem to have any help other than single-page static sites being converted to a wp-theme, which is not my use case at all.