Blogging in Dreamweaver

Question

I am an artist and have created my website using iWeb and
hosted through MobileMe (formerly .mac).
Website: www.sfumato420.com
Within the site, I have created, via iWeb, multiple blogs,
each representing one of my paintings.
I wish to transition over to Dreamweaver, but I am having
difficulty trying to figure out how to incorporate the blogs as I
have done with iWeb.
I was wondering if anyone could give me any advice on how to
begin such a daunting task.
I have heard within the forum that WordPress was the best way
to go, however, a question I have is:
"do I create the blog in WordPress, then import it or embed
it into my Dreamweaver project?"
I have heard of ThemeDreamer, however, I am looking for an
alternative that I do not have to pay for in the beginning in case
it is a dead end.
I am not afraid to learn how to do this, I just would like
someone to point a finger in a direction on where to start.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Sfumato420

Answer 1

To create a basic blog you'll need to write your blog pages in something like PHP. I prefer php. To see what you are doing you'll need to install WAMP or MAMP (for mac). Search for those downloads and read up. It's easy to set up a local host to use in building your database.
You should first set up a basic log-in system so that you must log-in to post or log-in to write comments. There are lots of tutorials on how to do this. You just set up a mySql database and set up a users table. Give it the following columns. id, date, userName, password, access, and approval.
Dreamweaver CC and CS6 (and earlier versions) have tools to automatically set up log-in, restrict access and log-out pages. These are quite easy to setup and there are a bunch of tutorials on how to do this.
Now that you have your log-in system working locally you'll have to set up a database on your web server. Apache servers are easier than windows servers and they are the most common. Log-in to your DNS provider and set up a new database, use PHP my admin to move your users table from your system to your DNS provider.
Now it's time to set up a simple data entry form for creating posts. You'll need a table. Call it posts or something like that. Set up the following fields. id, date, userID, postData, and approval.
Use Dreamweaver tools to now setup a form to insert data into these fields. There's your data entry part.
Now set up a record set that looks at the posts table and retrieves the date, userID, and postData and set up a repeating region on your page to echo the data, the user info and the post.
That's all there is to it. You can find tutorials on all of those steps and CS6 and earlier have wizards that will build all the forms for you. It's easy. I do it every day. It's much lighter weight than something like WordPress or the other CMS systems out there, but if you build it from scratch you'll need to add all the features you may want to add in the future by hand.