Which is why suggestions like OP’s are never useful or actually serious. I honestly consider them snobby. Like the person who tells you you really ought to check your engine oil, radiator fluid, and brakes everytime you get in a car. It would prevent some awful issues sure, but it’s not gonna happen for 99% of people.
Having static site generator still require an admin endpoint that end users can use to author, publish or otherwise manage the content. Pushing that to a local tool means now you need to somehow synchronize that content across all of the end users devices without git. Not to mention if there is no server side component that means the client needs to have full permission to publish content on the server. Until recently ssh was the only option. Maybe someone could vibe an iroh app that gives you a vpn'd server side app without that now.
Did you try to implement it seriously? Naturally you need an admin endpoint, it just does not have to be reachable for everybody from the internet, just via your VPN. Big difference.
The person you're replying to didn't mention a static site generator. You could simply use Vinyl(fka Varnish), and after you pulled your PHP down, your boring brochure site would still be up.
The first site I put up professionally was a handrolled static generator written in PHP for a state website. Users just edited text files, triggered a rebuild, and then there was a sync to prod if staging looked fine. They could even add new sections by creating new subdirectories, and Imagemagick would automatically conjure new menu buttons and the code would put them in the right place.
> Pushing that to a local tool means now you need to somehow synchronize that content across all of the end users devices without git.
This is not hard. Rsync? Rsyncd?
> Not to mention if there is no server side component
Why would there be no server-side component? What does that even mean? Just give them a script to trigger if you don't want them to have permission to do anything. Give them another script to revert if you don't want to get any emergency calls.
This is not advanced technology. Weird to talk about it like it's impossible.
> never useful or actually serious
So strange. That site was so simple to deal with that it stayed up for a decade after I left. Ancient technology.
Use CityDesk: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/12/what-does-citydesk...
(So old.....)