Yep - and there's also some benefits performance and security wise to not having any serverside code at all (other than nginx, or whatever).
The problems you have with jekyll, pelican, et al is that you lose site-side search, 'related posts' (without some reasonably complex compile-side clobber), etc. etc.
Using extremely minimal PHP lets you deploy just as easily, you don't get too much of a performance hit (a hell of a lot better than wordpress, etc), you can still do search, related posts, forms, embedding, and all that.
PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad. It's only awful when used to build anything massivly complex (such as joomla! or drupal...), and that it encourages messy project design.
The problems you have with jekyll, pelican, et al is that you lose site-side search, 'related posts' (without some reasonably complex compile-side clobber), etc. etc.
Using extremely minimal PHP lets you deploy just as easily, you don't get too much of a performance hit (a hell of a lot better than wordpress, etc), you can still do search, related posts, forms, embedding, and all that.
PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad. It's only awful when used to build anything massivly complex (such as joomla! or drupal...), and that it encourages messy project design.