Blogging with Dreamweaver.

Question

Okay. I see some people have asked this question before, but everyone who answers seems to give the least helpful answers I've ever seen in any situation in my entire life. So I'm going to be really specific about the question here and really, really hope for something other than redirecting to another site or the recommendation not to use adobe products. 
I own Dreamweaver CS6. I have built a website. I would like one page of that website to have a blog.
Everything I read seems to say something about PHP. I don't know PHP. (I am capable of learning new things though, so if I have to I will... but I'd like to know more about the endgame before I put in even more time on this.) I also keep seeing a lot about using blog services such as Wordpress or Blogger.
I'm a newbie. I have built the website, and with the exception of the blog and comments section, it essentially works. But I have only uploaded it to a school site. I have not yet tried to uploading to the site that will ultimately have my domain name.
Perhaps this is a question that will be answered when I try to upload to different site, but - I'm not entirely sure why I couldn't simply update my site whenever I want to post a new blog. I mean - why can't I just open Dreamweaver, edit my blog page, and upload? Obviously, the comments section would still be an issue - but, in terms of just blogging, why wouldn't I just update my page every day? Is that a problem? Are there costs associated with that? What's the deal?
Okay - now assuming there's an answer to that, rather than direct me to another website, could someone explain just how putting a blog into Dreamweaver works? If I actually go through the process of installing even more stuff onto my little computer, from there is it what? A matter of cutting and pasting PHP code into the Dreamweaver site? Do I link them somehow? Is this something the server would have to take care of?
Honestly, I don't mind not having a comments section if that's the hard part. I mean, if uploading an edited page every day is viable, I could also just have people email comments and I could stick 'em in there exactly how I want, right? So seriously, I'd love to know why blogging seems so complicated. And once I know that, I'd like to know the simplest way to incorporate blogging into my site. -I don't want to be redirected to Wordpress - I don't find their information particularly enlightening. It's just more verbage along the lines of, "Download this and all your problems will be solved!" I'd rather know exactly what's going on before I do that.
Also, if your answer is to not use Dreamweaver - please don't reply. I mean, duh - we're on the adobe site, I have a question about an adobe product, obviously I already spent money on the darn thing - please, if you're kind enough to reply, please also be kind enough to keep that in mind.
Thanks!
M

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.