Making a blog from scratch with no php-knowledge

I think it would definitely be MUCH easier to go with a prepackaged blog, and then customize it. Learning PHP and MySQL from scratch and getting good enough with it to write a full database-driven website would take you months, and then it would be your responsibility for upgrades, optimization, security, etc. Do some research on customizing existing blog software, that will take more like days. It's usually quite simple if the rest of your site is CSS-based... just link it to your main stylesheet, do some stylesheet tweaking, and you're already 75% finished... unless you are talking about some kind of totally wild design for your blog.

If you don't have any php knowledge it's not going to be easy to make a blog from scratch, you'll probably end up relying on tutorials or getting lot's of help from other people when you may aswell have just used wordpress or some other package.

You can change the designs to match pretty much whatever your site looks like, with some pakcages it's easier to do that than others. personally I only have experience with Wordpress and sNews, sNews was easier to customize because it's so lightweight and relies on about 2 actual pages for the entire system.

If you were to go ahead and make your own system it would only be as complex and featurefilled as sNews I think so I recommend checking that out.

I disagree, I don't like these "package"-blogs either and so I'd prefer to write my own, and there are loads of tutorials out there to help you. I'm sure it would be much more interesting learning to program than just uploading a bunch of Wordpress files and hey-presto you have a blog.

http://www.oxyscripts.com/item-408.html I think this tutorial is a good place to start, its a news management script, or in your case, blog management. Once you get the basics and understanding, you could develop it even further.

It shouldnt be that hard!!

I've done it, its probably not the most secure thing in the world but its not to bad!

Here's the tutorial that I started with

http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/index.php

I figure the time you spend coding a blog from scratch would take away from actually blogging. If you think PHP coding and hooking it to a mysql database would be easier than rewriting a bit of CSS code, then you'll be in for a surprise.

Try Joomla and purchase some RocketTheme templates.

What is a blog anyway? Wikipedia defines it as:


So theoretically you could just keep adding text or articles to your html pages and hey presto you have a blog. You don't even need a database at all. The problem being that everything is hard-coded and you don't have all of the added functionality that php allows, commenting etc....

Learning php + MySql before having a solid grounding in xhtml + css, strikes me as learning to run before you can walk. Why don't you download a copy of wordpress and find a theme that is as close to your radical site design as possible. Then get a good css book and customize that theme to get as close to the design that you want as possible.

You will find that with enough coding skill, wordpress is infinitely customizable and extendable. I'm at the stage now where I'm teaching myself php, because I really want to design my own plugins and themes.

I honestly reccomend you not to discount something like wordpress before you give it a go. You might save yourself a lot of time and if you don't make an effort to learn css you are very soon going to get left behind in the world of webdesign