@Jeffro - No, I don't see static site generators as going back in time, it is all a question of asking whether certain overheads we take for granted are really necessary.

Although it is heresy to say it, Ghost is not some huge departure from WordPress, it is just a shinier version of the same thing but with the advantage that, because it does not yet exist, everyone can project their personal wish-lists upon it. A lot of people will be disappointed when Ghost ends up being exactly what they have so slickly described and no more.

All dynamic CMSes have essentially the same advantages and disadvantages - it was very easy for you to publish this post and the content changes every time someone adds a comment. That is all pretty magical but the magic comes with a certain amount of administrative and resource overhead - just a few posts ago, we were discussing the performance issues you have been having here on WPTavern.

Haters massively exaggerate the WordPress overhead, but we have to admit that it exists and that, in some situations, the cons outweigh the pros.

Today, I would say that 90% of small business sites simply do not need a dynamic CMS - in theory, they like the idea of being able to go in and easily change things but, after the initial burst of activity when setting up, they never touch it and don't have the sort of content that attracts real comments.

Of course, we give them WordPress because that is what they have heard of and they have the reassurance that there are plenty of books and training videos showing you how to make a post.

The supposed security disadvantages of WordPress are also negligible, now that there are excellent management services that make it easy to keep everything updated, along with good backup + malware-monitoring services such as VaultPress, but the reality is that these "brochure" sites are, essentially, static, they should not really require a database.

As the static site generators improve and simplify their backends, and as static hosting options such as Amazon S3 and CloudFront improve and become cheaper, it is worth asking whether most sites would not be better managed by an application running on the owner's computer or a hosted service, making it easy for changes to be made and spitting out a static rebuild that will require no database, no clever caching and no clever security measures.

Just to clarify, this is all just pie-in-the-sky, WordPress has the momentum, and there are plenty of situations in which only a particular WordPress plugin or theme will do. I'm just saying that, if Ghost or any other project really wanted to dropkick us all into the future, they should have considered a more radical departure from the WordPress model.

Here is my bet: the next major change in the CMS landscape will come when Amazon or Google fund the development of a hosted static site generator that spits directly into their cheap, distributed, infinitely scalable static hosting services. If you see either of those companies buy Disqus, that will be a sign that they are gearing up for precisely that.