[bikamonki]

I've been an evangelist of static sites for a while. With over 15 yrs of experience doing sites I started in static and saw the "dynamic movement" born and grow (at some point I even programmed my own DCMS!); in most cases the motivation to install a DCMS was that the client wanted to update content in-house instead of paying a webmaster (a sound business idea?) but the reality is that even when using a dead simple DCMS clients always find it difficult to run it and still contact the webmaster. Furthermore, the vast majority of sites are seldom or never updated so having the 'kick me' sign in those cases is nosense. I guess a strong selling point of DCMS that made us all buy in even knowing that it was a bad idea where themes and plugins! So many of them, so nice looking, cross-browser tested and so easy to install. Clients where über happy with the end product.

So a couple of years ago I decided to do static sites for ALL my clients (there may be dynamic components that I normally implement with a back-end data service). I still have a few dozen sites and web apps with DCMS but the goal is to migrate them as well.

[icebraining]

The best mix may be a (hosted) dynamic editor that generates and deploys the static site. Have you considered this solution? It probably won't eliminate the need for a webmaster, but it should help reduce the requests for small changes while keeping the benefits of the static site.

[burke]

I think I tried a blog engine once that did this. Maybe it was https://movabletype.org/ ? In any case, I really wish more people/tools employed this strategy.

[bikamonki]

I think more devs will adopt it when we have plugins and themes that can be installed with a click! So far I have been able to adapt HTML themes to a front-end MVC (Angular or Backbone) but it is a long manual process...

[bikamonki]

Yes I agree, that is what I use now, in fact I have an additional layer: the static CMS generates JSON that in turn is fed to an front end MVC to render the pages. Assets are uploaded to AWS so I can use/reuse them. I am also serving sites directly from AWS S3 so there is no server to deal with at all. Everything dynamic can be done with SAAS/PAAS (comments, email, form collection, etc). Any static CMS that you recommend? I am using a (very limited) house blend for now, I call it Statico ;)

[jeffreyrogers]

I agree, this way seems the best. The reason people like WordPress so much is because it abstracts away everything except writing content. Users don't care how the site is served (and most nontechnical users won't even know).