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.
Clay - Jinja2 for easy site prototyping, MIT.
Complexity - A refreshingly simple static site generator, for those who like to work in HTML.
Cyrax - poetic Jinja2 engine, used for osgameclones.
Mynt - Static website generator based on Markdown and Jinja2. BSD-3.
Obraz - Static blog-aware site generator mostly compatible with Jekyll, MIT
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.
staticninja - MIT, Jinja2, auto-compile. That simple.
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These are outdated, but worth mentioning: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
See also static blog generators.
Dead links for software archaeologists
** ASCII diagram was drawn with Far Manager