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Comment by ckluis | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if wordpress itself had the option of pressing a button saying - push to static. When you make an edit -> update static files. This would be fantastically easier + it would potentially mean 1/4 of the web gets faster overnight.

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Unfortunately you'd have to at least modify most WP plugins to get them to work with this new system. At some point it becomes easier just to try to move everyone over to a born-static platform like Ghost.

ModX - a PHP cms which is fairly popular has a static site exporter. I havent' played with modx in a while, hopefully it's still a feature since their many updates in the last 5 years.

Why should it be a button, rather than having anything affected by a change automatically re-generated with cache control headers updated properly?

I was really meaning when you hit publish it would auto-reflow all the static pages. The great news is WordPress could come up with a static way of using javascript for things like sidebars so you wouldn’t necessarily have to repaint every page with every blog post.

Something like call partial (list of recent blog posts) which itself could be static. Two-to-three static calls and you could have a very clean and robust system with no database queries.

oh man, that's a great idea, that would grow WP adoption rate by 1000x

It literally couldn’t grow that much. It can only go from 1/4 of the web to 4/4 of the web. :)

I Always give a 110%, maybe my math is wrong!

What makes you think that it would grow its adoption rate at all? If I were to take a guess, I'd say most Wordpress installations are done by people who don't care about server load, and don't fret out over a 2s load time instead of 200ms.

In fact, that was the way Moveable Type worked and was a dominant publishing tool before WordPress took off.

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