Best way to 1: build a simple site AND 2: parse it out as static html

[isync]

I am currently in the process of designing a site for a client. He wishes static html pages, about 50, as the sites backend.

No dynamic pages, no php, no perl, no fancy stuff. Just a navigatable static site - ok - with a simple contact form as most ambitious add-on.

Now,
coming from a "use highly dynamical backends" design philosophy, I do not want to go back and do all pages one by one like in the Mozilla 1.0 days. Nor do I want to use the sledge hammer for such a simple project.

What would you guys suggest as a let's say dynamic framework, like a simple CMS, that can spit out the whole project as static html pages. Is there such a tool someone of you uses for ventures like mine? I don't want to have to go into the code page by page if the client requests marginal changes...

Currently my idea is to do it all in my dynamic-fashion. By letting a local crawler run over the project and do a snapshot I would get the static .html pages to upload to the clients server.

[Veil]

Maybe you can use fwrite() to write all the HTML directly to a file; saves the crawler step. After that also upload it directly to the client's server using PHP.

[londrum]

i would just use simple php.
do one page for the header, one for the sidebar, and whatever else, and then include the files into every page like you would do normally.
...but cache each page before you deliver it.

store the cached pages into a directory structure indentical to his one, and then just upload it to the clients server. as far as he will be concerned they will just all be static pages.

[isync]

Thanks to you all!

Yes, I will go for a dynamic variant which I will then write out as static html.