I am really happy to announce new little project of mine – Phrozn.
For quite some time I have been using static site generators written in Ruby an Python. In many cases, static site is exactly what you want. Consider blogs, manuals/books, info pages.
Given the scale of how client-side technologies (such as JavaScript) evolved, most of dynamic functionality can be implemented using client-side scripts + remote web-services (e.g. Disqus for comments). More than often we a going down that road even on our completely dynamic sites – it makes things more simple.
I am not saying that platforms such as WordPress are going down. I don’t think so. But I think there are many people, just like me, that do not use more than 1% of WordPress functionality, and as such I simply do not need the whole WP for publishing in my blog.
All I need is to write some article in my favorite editor (Vim), run some tool which will wrap entry into layout, add styles and whistles, and publish the entry. Right now, on this very blog, I don’t see any feature I can not have with
static site generator + JavaScript + some well-known service
And the clear benefit for me is relying on my favorite editor (I HATE text-area editors). Coupled with format independence (I can write my entry in HTML, or Twig, or Textile, or Markdown or any other esoteric beast), I get an ideal solution for my simple needs.
Other thing to consider is resources. Running WordPress is certainly way more resource-expensive (both CPU and RAM) than having static web site. For me this means I can have all my projects on medium server with more simple maintenance and caching strategies.
All this is good, but I couldn’t find any static site generators in PHP. Given the amount of generators in other languages I was surprised. So, I decided to create one myself, that’s how Phrozn project was born 
It is in early stages of development, but is already quite usable. Please check out documentation and let me know if you have any questions.
P.S. I will move this blog into Phrozn pretty soon, so that you have yet another example of “phrozn site” (source code of phrozn.info site is available on GitHub).
New Project: Phrozn – static site generator in PHP…
Given the scale of how client-side technologies (such as JavaScript) evolved, most of dynamic functionality can be implemented using client-side scripts + remote web-services (e.g. Disqus for comments). More than often we a going down that road even on…
[...] made Victor Farazdagi create a static site generator for PHP, Phrozn. He wrote about this in his blog on 10th April. Phrozn requires PHP 5.3 and the author claims to have used the code from popular [...]
I am sorry if I sound silly. But, can we use Phrozn with existing WordPress blog or any other existing PHP project?
@Vijay – not sure if I understand it correctly, but if you are referring to importing data from existing blog, thus making Phrozn “blog-aware” then it is a planned addition but as of now (ver 0.1.*) it is not implemented yet.
Victor, I wanted to ask whether we can use Phrozn to somehow import existing PHP project codes and convert those to static pages. But now, it doubt its not possible.
nice project!
i’m currently using wordpress for my current blog but exactly as you said, i might use 1% of it and i think i can use a better solution. i’m turning to a static site now using nanoc, a ruby site compiler. but i like a lot your twig support! i’m already using symfony1 for other projects and checking out symfony2 and the twig template system, so i’ll definitely check out phrozn!
thx.
@godbout: yep, checked nanoc when preparing the design docs for Phrozn. Once I implement the “import from wp” functionality, I guess trying phr will be way easier. As I said, will use this very blog for testing