Building static PHP pages is easy (and is demonstrated in the first block of code). So easy it's hard to beat by a significant margin, especially for small projects like this seems geared towards.
Building dynamic - much less real-time - PHP pages is not-so-easy, and certainly not that easy. At absolute simplest you have to look into JavaScript as well.
But after a few minutes I realized that if you look at it from the client's point of view, the rendered page really is static. It's not always the same between requests, but once it's rendered, it's not likely to change. So you're right in that respect!
What I got a kick out of is that my remark could be taken both with and without its tongue-in-cheek intent. It really is amazing that, once upon a time, PHP was considered dynamic. And now we want more!