Sculpin – PHP Static Site Generator (opens in new tab)

Time and efficiency is the main point. Take a blog: if you write it entirely by hand and add an article, you now have to:

* include it in the main page

* update the RSS feed

* include it in all the category/tag listings

* if you have prev/next article links, you have to add it to the last article

* included images need to be prepared for web

* if you show a code example, you might want to syntax-highlight it

If you want to change the design, you have to touch all pages (or do search/replace and hope that it doesn't mess anything up)

...

Or you could have a program that you feed text + raw images for your articles and that automatically generates all the necessary files/changes old ones accordingly, based on this input and templates.

The result then can be served by web server that doesn't speak any server-side language.

A static site still designates a site with no server-side processing, just serving of (static) content. As for it being plain HTML, no, it can be full of JS, videos, whatever, it's still static.

I do remember a time when the expression "dynamic HTML" was popular to designate HTML+JS. Therefore, "static" may have been used in contrast to "dynamic" to designate plain HTML pages indeed. This is not the case now.

Static site generators are used to speed up the process of development in terms of being able to code it as you would a dynamic site, but "compiling" down to a production-ready static site with minified code. A lot of them allow you to do things like including partials, string interpolation, using middleware and pre-processors, etc.

if you write html files individually, you'll have to update the navigation of each file when you add a new page. Same issue with categories, tags etc. SSGs just make it a bit easier to manage that stuff, and provide a framework to add other functions - markdown support, rss, sitemaps etc

Static site generators don't have server side processing.

They are best when building landing pages, corporate sites, or simple blogs. It's cleaner, lighter and more maintainable than solutions like wordpress, drupal or most cms

If you need some content management and like Sculpin then check out Concrete 5, they're both based on Twig and Symfony components, but Concrete 5 has the CMS features you might expect a customer to ask for.

Also worth mention is Zoltonic which is an Erlang thing (iirc it also works with Elixir). I've found it pretty easy to get set up with my very baisc understanding of Erlang.

I can get behind this. Hosting a WordPress is too inefficient for a website with just a /index /about and /contact. Most businesses go without updating their websites for months/years, if we find a way to sell static websites to clients that would be a step forward.

Unfortunately, in the mind of the client static=easy=worth less

It does - https://sculpin.io/getstarted/

The `curl -O https://download.sculpin.io/sculpin.phar` is what you are looking for - call that phar file instead of calling the composer.phar. That's where composer is "embedded"