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http://www.idlewords.com/2009/09/using_wordpress_to_generate...

There's a popular Wordpress plugin which does something similar called WP Super cache.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

That's how movable type, the predecessor to wordpress works. It's written in perl.

I use wp-super-cache for this. However, it's still not the same as static site generation. The entire Wordpress system still gets loaded at least to the plugin loading phase.

There are numerous db hits that take place before this stage (mainly to figure out which plugins need to be loaded).

Also, the PHP must be interpreted in order to render html. The static site generation has _none_ of this as it's already pre-rendered in html.