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I've been working on a content management system for use with our clients. The system actually preceded me, but we undertook a complete rewrite for this next version. So we came in with certain architectural decisions already decided, and static publishing was one of them (i.e., the CMS publishes to files which Apache serves independently from the CMS).

While this always seemed like a pretty reasonable technique, I'm not sure if it would have been the first thing to occur to me. A more dynamic system (like Plone) seems a lot easier and more general. At least, easier if you do the Right Thing -- the naive approach is easy with a static CMS, but the naive approach fell far short of what we needed, which is why a rewrite was required.

But now that we are getting close to going live with the CMS, I'm very happy with static publishing. A big part is that it takes the pressure off of going live. I can be sure before going live that the public website is correct. The actual CMS may explode in flames, but the site will be fine. Going live with a web application is always a stressful process, and anything that reduces the stress of that is a great benefit. As time goes on, static publishing is also a big stress reduction for the system administrator, since a simple Apache configuration is a lot more reliable under different loads and configurations than any dynamic site will be.

Another benefit is that it's really easy to migrate existing sites into the CMS -- the pages only need to be as structured as you want them to be, and you can import the entire site verbatim if you really want, applying structure and template later. Anything that allows incremental processes is a big +1 in my book. Maybe that makes it +2.

This has also freed us up to do lots of tweaking of the system and UI. Unit tests have been very successful at giving us a solid foundation, but the user interface is very difficult to test, especially as it gets constantly tweaked. Inevitably there are bugs. If the CMS interface had to be as stable as the public site (which has to be extremely stable), then I'd be very nervous about the changes we are making late in the game. But I'm not worried, because the application remains Stable Enough, and it lets us make significant improvements instead of going into a long, deep pre-release freeze.