[jordanlev]

I agree that a lot of frameworks are overkill, but if you put yourself in the frame of mind of a non-programming designer or a layperson who just needs to manage content on their site, using a static HTML generation tool is out of the question. I've been using octopress/jekyll recently and think it's amazing and really love it, but there's no way in a million years I could give that to a client to manage their own website.

Also, it's not really wasting time or money -- cheap shared hosting costs the same regardless of whether you're serving a php/mysql app or static html files. And setting up a wordpress site is probably easier for non-programmers than getting a jekyll setup going.

It's definitely a colossal waste of CPU power though, but that train left the station 10 years ago.

[amirhhz]

I agree, my point is mostly relevant to someone with some minimum level of technical ability. But providing a usable interface and "install" process for a static website generator is the missing piece here.

Or a reversal to geocities days ... :-/

[LeafStorm]

An interesting idea that I had once is a server-side application that can edit the site files, save them to Git or Mercurial, and then compile them statically and push to a server via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 API, or rsync.

[simonbrown]

CushyCMS does that, but without DVCS (although it does support versioning).