[voyou]

If you're looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress, you could consider using Wordpress. Wordpress caching plugins can generate static HTML which then gets served to visitors directly by Apache or Nginx, without hitting PHP at all.

[jeromeparadis]

What I'm looking for is a plugin that can make a entire Wordpress site static to freeze sites in time so they don't require Wordpress, PHP or MySQL.

Another workflow could be to use WordPress locally in a VM to edit, then generate a static site you upload through git or whatever to a bare minimum server.

Any plugin that fit the bill? I remember searching but never found something perfect.

[drzaiusapelord]

...and this is why we're not moving to SSGs even though this almost exact article gets posted monthly here.

Its trivial to put in a cache level that generates and stores static html in from of WP, Drupal, etc. So you get both worlds; the tools that dynamic CMS's give you and the performance of a static site.

I think it took me 5 minutes to install varnish on a WP server I have. Varnish delivers these pages straight from ram. My page load performance is fairly absurd. If that's too technically daunting or your webhost doesn't support varnish, totalcache is also good. Boost for Drupal is good too.

[vidarh]

It's far from optimal for deployment, though, as you still occasionally depend on that WP site, and then have the hassle of handling availability etc.

I wish more CMSs would support exporting all changes directly, so that you could e.g. rsync the sites out to edge servers or a CDN and be able to use it for full failover too without suddenly having stuff expire from the caches at the most inconvenient times.

Movable Type used to be able to export everything to flat files, for example (though, I guess more out of necessity back in a world where not everyone would have a host that could/would provide PHP).

I just started redoing my blog to iterate over all the pages and wrapping my Sinatra app to fake requests to generate a full static copy that way. Lets me optionally serve it up dynamically when writing, and then generate a static copy. It's just a few hours dirty hack for now, but I'll be doing this more often - it's so nice to have most of the content completely stateless.

[smt88]

I believe WordPress is bundled with a plugin that does that, right?

I think the main problem is that it requires an extra step when you're running Apache (modifying .htaccess) to become truly static.