A static site generator is a program that takes content, webpage design templates and configuration files and based on them generates a directory tree of HTML and other files that represent a website. The resulting website is static in the sense that it does not contain CGI or other server-side scripts and could as well be distributed as a ZIP file with no HTTP server at all. The content that a static site generator processes into HTML is usually marked up with a lightweight markup language like Markdown.
One popular modern example of a static site generator would be Jekyll . It is written in Ruby.
dbohdan 2014-06-16: I'm working to replace an ad hoc shell script static site generator with Tcl code. Are there any others written in Tcl?
JM see: http://www.scarpaz.com/MajaMaja/index.html
See also