Being the tech person in my family, I have been recruited to create my brother's business web site for his saddle-making/leather goods company, Cannon Custom Leather (nothing there yet). It's being hosted on Yahoo! Small Business because I am not about to set up a web site where I have to manage a shopping cart or credit card purchases, or anything else along those lines. I will design the look and get the site up, but it is going to be a simple site with product shots and descriptions and that's about it. Something that could be coded by hand if I so chose.
But web frameworks are not aimed towards projects like this. I need static files that I can just upload for a site. I have no problem with using wget or curl or some such on my local machine to suck down the entire web site so I have a cached version and then upload the static pages to the FTP server. But the trick is I need static files that end in ``.html`` or some other file extension that any old web server will pick up as HTML. Now I could be wrong and having a fancy URL scheme might work and Yahoo!'s server's might actually handle files with no file extension properly, but even if that is true I doubt everyone has that ability.
I have been considering Django since people whose opinion I respect have spoken relatively well of it and its URL resolution scheme seems flexible enough to work for specifying views even when the path ends in ``.html``. And if I don't find a web framework that works for me (which is possible since making it so my brother and sister-in-law can edit text and just email it to me would be great and then says reStructuredText to me and not some fancy DB backend thing), I still need to find a good templating system. I might just let Guido continue to be a templating beta tester for me since I tend to like how Guido thinks about stuff.
Anyway, I doubt I am the only person in the world who has been forced to create a static web site for a friend or family member and wants a good framework or tool set to help me with this. Every web site can't be hand-rolled HTML or dynamically created pages. Someone has to care about me in the middle! =)
