Many, many people are screaming that Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) is a POWERFUL combination, and I whole-heartedly agree. Even more people agree that MySQL is very powerful. From a different avenue, many people enjoy maintaining a weblog of some sort.
Given that, why are the (arguably) best blogging engines (in terms of flexibility, and customization abilities) simply scripts that generate static HTML pages to be served up one at a time in true-static fashion (see: moveable type, greymatter, and blogger)?
Sure, there are a million little scripts that have been written with MySQL in mind (see monaural jerk), but none of them allow the customization that these other tools do. My basic gripe is that they don’t support customization via HTML in a plain template file with storage of the data in a MySQL database. I don’t even care what language it is written in, as long as it does the basic blog-type tasks (post an entry, entry archives, comments, categories) with customization via template files and storage in MySQL or some other (non-windows based) database server or even XML flat files.
Why not? It’s not any more difficult. In fact, from my perspective it is easier, and less error prone and saves the user a million steps like “regenerating”. Additionally, it saves on overall storage space (because you don’t have all that bloated HTML that looks the same everytime), makes URLs look cleaner, and makes it easier to do a sitewide update.
Does an application like this exist and I’m just missing it, or is there a severe shortage here? I’d much rather jump on some other bandwagon than try and start my own.