Static site generator is a software that takes some text + templates as input and produces html files on the output. A picture:

   ┌──────┐   ┌───────────┐   ┌─────────────┐ **
   │ text │ + │ templates │ = │ .html files │
   └──────┘   └───────────┘   └─────────────┘

Generated site can be blog, game list, interactive demo or anything else.

Static site generators written in Python

• Blogofile - (Mako, Jinja2)-based generator with supports for (reStructuredText, Markdown, Textile), Git, Disqus, RSS feeds, plugins, and S3, very nice license with human touch.

• Hyde - Jinja2-based static web site generator, MIT, source

• Mynt - Static website generator based on Markdown and Jinja2. BSD-3.

• Poole - static website generator, Markdown. GPL.

• Pelican - Uses Markdown or ReST for content and Jinja 2 for themes. Supports DVCS, Disqus. AGPL.

• PubTal - Templating#SimpleTAL-based static site generator, BSD-3

• rest2web - Generates Websites from ReST contents, BSD

• Sphinx - Python's official documentation system that turns ReST into HTML, LaTeX, man pages, plaintext, and has many features for making site trees, inter-linking, and other documentation necessities (Jinja2 as default template engine). BSD.

• Tinkerer - blogging engine/static website generator powered by Sphinx with polite-correct license list.

From Aaron:

• html2text - useful tool to convert HTML into Markdown.

These are outdated, but worth mentioning:

• http://www.nthwave.net/elements/ - powerful tool for experienced web developers of year 2001, requires at least Python 2.2

Dead links for software archaeologists

• tahchee - Cheetah-based static web site generator

** ASCII diagram was drawn with Far Manager