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
Sphinx - Turns ReST into HTML, LaTeX, man pages, or plaintext. Created to by Python's official documentation system and has many features for making site trees, inter-document linking, and other documentation necessities (Jinja2 as default template engine).
Tinkerer - blogging engine/static website generator powered by Sphinx.
Poole - Static website generator based on Markdown. html2text - useful tool for conversion into Markdown.
Mynt - Static website generator based on Markdown (Jinja2 as a template).
Blogofile - (Mako, Jinja2)-based generator with supports for (reStructuredText, Markdown, Textile), Git, Disqus, RSS feeds, plugins, and S3, very nice license with human touch.
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
These are outdated, but worth mentioning: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
** ASCII diagram was drawn with Far Manager