This problem didn’t take a lot of time to figure out, but i did notice that I couldn’t find any blog post about this particular problem when in need of a quick answer.

Basically the problem was that when I made a template for an Expression Engine site, the channel I wanted was not showing up.
Turns out, when in the “channel management” page, the channel had an assigned status group other than the default “open/closed/pending”. Expression Engine templates are set to default only the posts with the status of “open”. < not an intuitive template setting if your semi-new to EE >

So, the fix was very simple. In the template file, have the channel set the status attribute to be the custom status that was created:

{exp:channel:entries status="customStatus"}
... content
{/exp:channel:entries}