Why use a static site generator

In February, I spoke at the PHP South West meetup about Sculpin - a static site generator written in PHP.

Sculpin uses Twig, HTML and Markdown to generate static HTML files that you can upload to any web server.

You don't need PHP or a database server - making it simpler and cheaper to host compared to a CMS-powered site.

There's also no database for people to hack into and, as they're just static HTML pages, they are very quick to load.

The downside is that files need to be created and edited locally or editing Git files on GitHub, etc, as there's no CMS to log into.

Still, for some projects, static site generators are a great option.

For Drupal, there's Tome - a module that creates a static website from a Drupal installation, and something I plan to investigate.